


Lights Like An Avalanche

by fartherfaster



Series: Lights [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Coulson Lives, F/M, Family Dinners, Gen, Jarvis is people too, Magic, Work In Progress
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-12-05
Updated: 2014-07-12
Packaged: 2018-01-03 13:45:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 11
Words: 55,873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1071150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fartherfaster/pseuds/fartherfaster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jane makes a dangerous discovery in Norway; Thor deals with a royal pain in the ass; Darcy and Steve make each other blush; Coulson lives, and he, Clint, and Natasha have entire arguments with their eyebrows; Tony and Bruce are busy with science and Doctor Who; and Pepper is the only one who can keep the world turning on its axis, and everyone knows it.</p><p>It's Ragnarok.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Another Superhero

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the beginning, there are always promises made.

The drift of Thor’s thumb over her navel is just enough between putting Jane to sleep and keeping her awake. It brushes over the dip and swell in an uninterrupted rhythm, the soft cotton of her shirt doing nothing to block the heat of his hand. She reaches up sleepily, lacing her slender fingers loosely into the spaces between his.

            “Jane.”

            She taps a few odd beats against the back of his hand to tell him she’s paying attention. It’s not enough, however, so he uses the span of his hand to roll her gently back towards him. Even this high up in the tower, the nighttime fog drapes over the city and clings to the skin of the building and windows. New York blinks back at them, feeling far away.         

            “My Jane,” he says again, his voice so low that she feels it rumble through his chest and into her bones, her side pressed against the length of him. It rattles around between her ribs and she speaks without opening her eyes.

            “I’m listening, I promise.”

            He doesn’t speak again for a moment, instead watching Jane’s features in the light of the city. The cloud cover thickens, and Jane blinks as she feels the tingling creep of ozone across her skin. She lets her hands speak first; brushing her fingertips over his arms, the backs of his hands. His hand on her belly moves to bracket her hip, and she rolls with the motion, supported on his chest by one broad hand on her back. Concern is writ in his features; his shallow breaths and the hard set of his mouth. The feeling of ozone crawls up the back of her neck and she suppresses a shiver. The pads of her thumb smoothed over his brow as if she can soothe away the lines around his eyes with touch. “Thor,” her voice is a sleepy whisper, “what’s wrong?”

            “I am troubled, my love.”

            Under normal circumstances, Jane would sigh and tell him she knew, but the hard line of his mouth worries her, too. He has the purest heart Jane has ever seen. He has no patience for conversational lies or avoidances. His emotions and his powers act synchronously, and all of it shows on his face. She waits for him to speak again, pulling back to look him in the eyes. They are lightning bright and focused on her, and she feels in turn hot and cold, pinned in place.

            “I would that you come home with me,” he says at last. 

            Whatever Jane has been expecting, this announcement was not it. Her heart felt as heavy as Mjölnir even as she tried to rationalise his thoughts. Thor continues to speak. “I am not the silver-tongue my brother is – my words are as delicate as my thunder, this I know. I speak to you now, my lady, with a heart that has yielded itself unto you. If this…” Thor’s voice, thick with emotion, nearly faltered, but he pushed on. “If this is against your desires, then so be it said that I will return to Asgard alone but still avowed to the protection of Midgard. Jane, my love, with these recent turns and terrors, you are the only star in my sky,” he brushed the pad of one thumb over the swell of her cheek, “but I would rather let you go than hold you unhappy with me.”

            As Thor spoke, Jane had lain across his chest, one hand fisted in his t-shirt, scarcely daring to breathe. His face conveying absolute sincerity was nearly enough to make Jane cry, but it was the way his voice and body trembled as he closed his confession that had Jane gripping his hand so tightly in hers. Though her immediate reaction was to kiss away his fears, they had agreed not to cloud their thoughts with physical intimacies just yet. Jane let him think it for reasons of modesty and honour – they’d really only known one another for a few weeks – but more honestly, she hadn’t known how to delicately tell him that several of Earth’s legends had him recorded as a god of fertility, and that was something Jane wasn’t willing to add to their already confusing lives. Instead, she leans in close and clutches his hand in both of hers, whispering back the things that had been rolling around her mind since Tony’s invitation: _“Your flyboy is back, and Avengers’ Tower has been outfitted with custom luxury apartments for all resident superheroes. Thor has requested space for you, so there’s an apartment for you joining his. PS: The top ten floors are private R &D playgrounds. Come play with us; we’re working on sharing.”_

            “Thor,” she laid her head back against his chest and listened for a moment to the steady, strong drum of his heart. Hesitantly, one massive hand came up to cup her nape, and Jane felt her eyes prick with tears again. “Thor, I love you, and I have loved you since that thunderstorm in the desert. You are… you are more than I can put into words. I never thought,” she pauses, wiping at her damp cheeks, “I never thought I would love someone the way I love you.”

            “You are hesitant,” he interrupts softly.

            “I’m not going to live as long as you. I’m human, you’re…” she mumbles her confessions against the skin of his neck, and he listens. “You’re going to take your father’s throne – like you should - you’re the heir to Asgard. I can’t…” her voice fades, but her thoughts are loud. _I can’t be what you need._

            “There is truth in your words, but shadows darker are in your eyes, my love. What is it you hold so tightly? What thought will you not bear to the light?”

            That Thor would see so clearly through her thoughts did not so much worry Jane as it did make her wish she was braver. The whirlwind of the past days had exhausted Jane – she’d only moved into the tower a week ago, Darcy having moved in only two weeks previous. Before this, it had been months of silence and research – with a brief interlude to Norway – praying for the sky to open and show her the face she couldn’t forget. “We’ve only known each other for a few weeks,” she said quietly, “and now you want to take me to Asgard?”

            “Do you doubt my sincerity, Jane?” His voice is gentle, but his hands stilled and the lines around his eyes deepened momentarily. Jane felt static all over her body, making her clothes cling.

            “No!” she answers abruptly, using the hand on his chest as leverage so they’re face to face. The word echoes around the floor, almost bouncing off the flagstones. “It’s the opposite, really.” Jane tries to keep his gaze but she ends up fiddling with a short, loose thread, then brushing her bangs out of her eyes. “I know you’ll never break a promise.” Thor felt his heart clench at her words. “But this is very sudden and very serious and it frightens me a little.” _A little a lot,_ her brain added helpfully.

            There’s a smile in his voice when he responds. “I understand that Midgardian courtships follow a stricter progression?”

            “Um,” Jane flounders for a moment, “sort of? Generally, people date for a while, meet the parents after several months… if that all goes well," she flutters her hands around as if she could generalise whole populations so succinctly. “They might get engaged. And _maybe_ get married a few years later. It’s all…”

            “Very slow,” Thor points out, a little petulant.

            “Well,” Jane huffs, intent on making her point, “it’s mostly to make sure your partner is dedicated, and that you want the same things,” she continues in a teasing tone, “arranged marriages are really frowned upon.”

            Thor smiles at the light in her eyes that accompanies her teasing. It settled his heart some to know that her nerves were due in part to a departure from the familiar, rather than a lack of trust in him. He could see how what in her culture took years to develop would be unsettling to watch grow over a matter of days. He shifts back against the headboard, but the oak holds strong and neither creaks nor groans under his weight. He pulls Jane into his lap, one hand soft against her throat as he tucks her under his chin. He could feel the flutter of her pulse under his fingertips, and wanted nothing more than to trace it to its source, place his lips against her breast and whisper his promises directly to her heart. It was not a boundary they had yet crossed, so he tried his best to keep his hands to himself. He was grateful of their clothes, in fact, because the thought of her bare skin was enough to scatter his thoughts, and he knew the dawning questions required focus from them both. “Jane,” he says quietly, and she stops playing with the hem of his t-shirt. “Answer me with absolute truth, no matter how far away the answers appear.” He pauses. “Do you wish for us to remain together?”

            She can hear how the question hurts him, how he feels obligated to ask. She clings to him in a momentary panic. “Yes,” she says, “yes a hundred times.”

            He heaves a sigh and wraps his arms around her more securely for just moment. “Do you wish to see Asgard; the realm, and my family?”

            She doesn’t answer right away, and her head spins with the connotations of ‘see’ versus ‘stay’. Her life’s research has been confiscated by SHIELD, though with its ramifications that may, at present, be best. _Besides_ , she thinks, _Thor visits Earth to fight with the Avengers. I’m not leaving behind any biological family, but I could visit._ At length, she replies, “Yes, I’ll go with you.”

            “Jane, my love,” Thor presses his face into her hair, pulls her up and kisses her, all questions and answers between their lips. There is peace in his heart because their love is requited. In his joy, he forgets himself, giant hands palming softly over her clothes, and Jane kisses him back with just as much force, small hands gripping his shoulders. He comes back to himself when both hands span her delicate waist and his thoughts take on a new direction. They have never been intimate – _not yet,_ cries a small voice gleefully – but he wonders if, beyond everything, she will give him this. “My love,” he repeats himself, “what of… children?”

            She places a few last, small kisses against the scruff of his jaw, and then raises sad eyes to meet his. Thor is already working on swallowing his disappointment and grief, reminding himself that it is enough if he only has her.

            “What if I can’t, Thor?” she whispers. “You’re Aesir, I’m human. What if we can’t?”

            He feels a lightness in his chest that contradicts her words. “Aesir and human are not so incompatible a match,” he tells her, pressing his forehead to hers with a sigh of relief. “What is more important,” he says quietly, “is the truth in your heart. Is this something you desire to share with me?”

            Jane still looks skeptical. She strokes his face softly, sweeping the blond away from his eyes. “If love was enough,” she says, abandoning that thought halfway through. “Wanting doesn’t make something come true, Thor. But yes. It frightens me,” she says, ignoring the voice in her head that sounds suspiciously like Darcy, “but that is something I want. I’ve never really let myself dwell on those kinds of thoughts,” she feels obligated to explain. “But if they were yours…” her eyes go far-away for a moment and Thor wishes he could see as her mind does. “I would like that.”

            Thor settles her body more fully across his thighs, holds her to his chest as his heart races is an unfamiliar way. There is one last question, and it burns in his mouth, maybe being the hardest of all to ask. “A partner dedicated,” he quotes her, “and who desires the same things as you.” Jane’s eyes are light with teasing when he finds them. “On this matter and all others we have agreed. But Jane, the throne… that is not a duty I can simply look away from.”

            Jane looks away from his eyes and instead focuses on an imaginary thread on the V-neck of his shirt. He recalls a comment from the young and ferocious Lady Darcy, when Jane once wore a similar expression and Darcy had declared in frustration that Jane ‘stop thinking so loud!’ At the time, the phrase had escaped him, but now it makes perfect sense. Rather than interrupting, he waits her out.

            “I have no training,” she states, “swords or politics or how to act in… court,” she stumbles over her phrasing, “and I have no royal blood. Here… Royalty is taken very seriously,” she finishes hastily before he can cut her off with an incredulous and slightly offended look. “Almost like it has a set of laws unto itself. I have no idea if there is even room in your culture for our hopes, Thor, but I’ll make my promises now.” She breathes deeply, and Thor feels nearly as exhausted from this conversation as he does from the battlefield, and just as elated when the tide turns in his favour.

            “I want to be with you. I want all of these things, and I promise I will be, as long as I can. Your family… they matter to you, and I have a feeling the will have something to say about all of this, but,” she stops fidgeting long enough to look at him levelly, and he can see the fright she’s working hard on stamping out. “You are more important to me. And I know, really, you’re a king,” she lets out a thin laugh, short and fed by nerves. “I guess so long as you will have me, I can be your queen.” A small voice in her head is snarky and sharp, adding _that’s not presumptuous at all_ , but it is silenced by the brilliant light that comes from Thor’s face. His happiness at her words is a tangible thing, and it infects her with its warmth.

            Jane flops backwards out of his arms with a laugh. The bed is vast, and she takes advantage, stretching muscles that were previously so tight with tension. She sighs a happy sigh as Thor laughs with her, his own from simple, unrestrained joy. “That was quite a speech,” she says, a little flabbergasted with herself.

            “One I will hold dear my life long,” he teases back, shifting forward to loom over her. He runs his hands over her covered thighs, then plants them securely on either side of her hips. He settles a fraction of his weight against her, kissing softly along her neck as she grins, drawing him into her space with hands in his hair and her knees raising up to gently frame his narrow hips. One hand slides up over the ridge of her hip, the pads of his calloused fingers gently picking at the edge of her shirt before inching it up, spreading one flat, massive palm against her bare belly. Jane gasps sharply at the new sensation, and Thor stills completely.

            “My Jane,” he says, drawing his hand away and leaning back, “I understand the tradition of waiting until after marriage for such pleasures. Do you wish this for us?”

            Jane sputters and thinks about laughing if his expression was not so sincere. Instead, she reaches for his hand, places a kiss on his palm, and settles it down on her abdomen again. She keeps her tone light as she asks, “Who told you that?”

            “Captain Rogers took me into his confidence that… Jane?”

            She tried, but the giggle that comes up cannot be helped. She clears her throat and apologises. “Sorry,” she says, a smile still tugging on her lips. “It’s just… those ideas are quite traditional in that today, they’ve mostly been discarded, except for those who are maybe very religious or conservative.”

            She loosens her knees from around his hips, trying to sit upright against the squashed pillows behind her. Thor places hand on her elbow as leverage, but he doesn’t yet move out of her space. Jane has a gentle flush to her cheeks that fades down her neck, enticing and warm. “Um,” she starts, feeling very at a loss for what to do, or how to explain this to herself. She and Donald had dated for more than two months before they were intimate, but their discussions never even made it past a hypothetical dog. In contrast, here she and Thor have very nearly pledged themselves to each other – the keystone being the decision from Thor’s father, who is more importantly, the king – and it almost seems juvenile to hold back. She feels shy in a way that reminds her of high school, but when she looks up, Thor is waiting for her with patient eyes.

            “Not so much waiting on purpose,” the sheets are twisted around her ankles and it feels like a good metaphor. “Just… introducing change slowly.” She reaches out with a small hand, tracing a fingertip over his collar bone, exposed by the open neck of his shirt. She watches the way he inhales slowly, leaning into the touch. She can feel the heavy thrum of the artery at the junction of his neck, steady and strong and only a fraction slower than hers.

            Thor is struck by a sudden idea, and he leans back on his hands, giving Jane room to breathe. He shifted slightly to one side, gently leaning his bulk against the cradle of Jane’s open lap. The hand free from his weight lies across her belly again, and Jane stifles a yawn behind the crook of her arm. “What of a Midgardian ceremony? Would you that we be wed before your arrival to Asgard?”

            She gave him a bemused smile and held in another yawn. They had come to bed just after midnight – Thor had been held back by debriefings on Hawkeye and Widow’s recon assignment, where as far as she understood, something, somewhere, was not going quite right because someone was using some kind of dangerous tech. Maybe. Jane knew about as much nothing as could be known from the tired glances and half-questions and Dr. Banner mumbling in what might have been Hindi. Her area of expertise was the Einstein-Rosen Bridge, and retrospective study of the Tesseract. Being in the dark was exhausting.

            “I don’t know how official it would be,” and despite her sleepy eyes she wants to laugh. Was reconciling religions a moot point if she was _marrying_ a god? Oh dear. “The government is pretty sticky about marriage,” she explained to his confused look. “We’d need a marriage license to do it at all, and that would mean a birth certificate for you…” she rambled off before coming back to her point. “It would be excessively complicated, and,” she looked at him carefully, “I get the feeling that the heir shouldn’t elope.” Thor looked a little lost at those words, so she said more plainly, “Running away and get married without telling anyone –especially family – because otherwise they might not give permission or acceptance.”

            He clearly doesn’t like the implications of what she’s said, but before he can say so another yawn catches Jane by surprise. It lightens his mood enough to discard his argument, instead offering, “Perhaps it is wiser to seek permission from the Lady Nött and her dark horse?”

            “The goddess of night?” Jane asks, as the shift and settle back into the bed, ending up face to face.

            “Aye, she is.” This close together, his voice rumbles through her.

            “Jarvis, can you turn on the fireplace, please?” Jane tilts her head to ceiling out of habit. The fireplace at the far end of the room quietly roars and rushes into sudden life.

            “The regular settings, Dr. Foster?” the AI politely inquires.

            “A softer flame on this eve, my friend,” Thor answers, though unlike Jane he does not lift his head from the pillow.

            “Certainly, sir. And many happy returns on your engagement.”

            Jane hears Thor snuffle, his body quickly slipping off to sleep without him. “Thanks, Jarvis,” she whispers back. “Just don’t let it slip yet, okay?”

            “Of course, Dr. Foster,” the AI replies in a near whisper, tone – if at all possible – conspiratorial. Jane can’t help but think that with all the socialization the computer gets now, with all the tower’s new residents, that he’s almost become another superhero, waiting in the wings.


	2. It's Friday

“Anything else, Jane?” Darcy calls over her shoulder, dropping the last box of garments on the large, unmade bed. Jane’s space in Thor’s apartment is bigger than her old hovel in Jersey, and while the boys did all the heavy lifting, unpacking and organising takes a more delicate touch. Darcy doesn’t think Jane will actually spend any time in here, and so teases her mercilessly about the ‘in-law suite’. She’s just about to get another jab in about where Jane packed her ‘pet rabbit’ when someone quietly clears their throat behind her.

         Darcy turns with a start to see Pepper Potts in the doorway of the bedroom, looking every bit the Fortune 500 CEO that she is. Darcy’s acutely aware in that moment of her own wardrobe – what she has been calling _New Mexico and Broke_ since she took the internship with Jane. Her nerves racket around until Pepper speaks.

        “Ms. Lewis, so nice to meet you at last.”

        Though the statement is professional and distant, the smile on Pepper’s face in genuine, and Darcy thinks she’s as warm and inviting as fresh fucking apple pie. She might be hungry, too.

        “Ms. Potts!” Darcy stammers, taking her smooth hand into her own clammy one.

 

* * *

 

Tony’s voice is unforgiving as he speaks over the other man. “Coulson, we’ve been over this. Darcy is on Team Avengers; she’s not SHIELD property to manhandle.”

* * *

 

        Darcy has been puttering around the lower common kitchen all morning, first making hot chocolate for anyone who passed through, and then settling in and working at the kitchen table, laptop, Stark Pad, Stark Phone, and several thick documents spread out around her. Steve had once asked about it, and he received an earful about old habits and a _forchristssakes don’t sneak up on people._ She’s obviously had enough of work, however, when she tied her hair into a hasty braid, abandoned her workstation, and started pulling who-knows-what from the cupboards. Steve walked in at that point with the intention of getting the afternoon light in the breakfast nook to sketch by.

        “Darcy?” he calls out, questioning.

        She manages to only throw _half_ a bowl of flour into the air. “Jesus fucking Horatio Christ!” she screeches, and while Steve goes a little pink around the ears to hear her say it, he couldn’t help but wonder what poor Horatio had done to wind up in there.

        “Sorry, Darce,” he mumbles, quietly laughing when she turns to face him. She’s wearing an apron covered in little angry Hulks, all smashing and leaping and generally wreaking havoc on the bright purple background. A good portion of the flour wound up in her hair, but she concentrates on cleaning the countertop first.

        “I’ve talked to you, and Clint, and Nat about creeping around here like that. At least have the decency to tell us you’re here, good God,” she complains.

        “Ma’am, yes ma’am,” he teases back gently, and Darcy shoots him a withering glare that she’s obviously soaked up from proximity to Natasha. As he makes his way past her to the breakfast nook, she makes a shooing motion with her hands, and Steve feints a coughing fit with all the flour dust she shakes loose.

       She turns back to whatever she’s doing, and Steve almost manages to settle into his headspace, lines coming to his hands smooth and easy, like from a memory. That’s when Darcy interrupts.

       “Stevie Wonder!” and Steve’s had enough pop-culture training, by now – mostly at Darcy’s own hands, in fact – to know that it’s almost an insult to both of them. Certainly to the real one.

       “What, Darce?” he asks, palm covering his drawing out of an unshakeable habit. She doesn’t even spare it a glance.

       “Chocolate, blueberry, or lemon poppyseed?”

_Ah,_ Steve thinks to himself. _Muffins._

       “Lemon,” he supplies, because of the three, they smell the best when they’re in the oven.

       “Okay,” she agrees, turning away once again. Thinking the peace will be restored, Steve nearly makes it back to his notebook when there’s a violent, muffled crash from the counter. Facing him again, Darcy announces, “Put your shoes on, Suzie. We’re going on a field trip!”

       All Steve can really get out in an inarticulate _huh_ before Darcy is snapping his sketchbook closed over his fingers, and then pulling him upright by the wrist. He goes with her momentum because the last thing they need is another flour cloud. “Why are we leaving?” he asks, “weren’t you baking?” All of her belongings have magically been tidied away into a shoulder bag that she leaves hanging over the back of a chair.

       “I’ve done everything I can – there’s nothing nice in the cupboards to put in them – and I’m so not a Martha-freaking-Stewart to actually check before I start something,” is the rushed response. He’s halfway through thinking _Martha..?_ when she says, “So, we’re getting groceries.”

       “Darcy,” Steve sighs, but she has already cut him off.

       “You can do the heavy lifting,” she says brightly, before looking at him seriously. “Go grab a beanie and some Aviators and that leather jacket with the collar,” she says more calmly. “No one will recognise you. We’ll be fine.”

        He really wants to argue her on it, because crowds recently have been beyond what he’s been comfortable with, and it makes him nervy and snappish and he doesn’t like that. As a result, he’s holed himself up for nearly three weeks now. The Avengers Tower has everything he needs in it, and he hadn’t thought that anyone noticed. But then, Darcy’s a potty-mouthed mix of Coulson -unimpressed stares- and Pepper -the _shoes_ \- and has absorbed their concerns and curiosities by osmosis. Never mind that Darcy was the one who told him what osmosis even was. She pulls him out of his thoughts with her favourite kind of teasing; there’s a glint in her eye that has the sole purpose of making him blush.

         “Five minutes, solider,” she purrs, and it sounds lewd and filthy when it leaves her mouth, despite the words themselves.

         Frustrated in an amused sort of way, he retaliates in a way that he’s been itching to try out. It honestly seems more like Bucky than it does like him, but he’s looking to shake a reaction out of her the same way she always pulls on his puppet strings. So, he gives her a long, slow looking-over, pausing here and there and _there_ for effect, before finally dragging his eyes back up to her face. He would say, in retrospect, that he was probably the more embarrassed party, but he manages to hide it in the face of Darcy’s unique shade of startled scarlet. “Ma’am, yes ma’am,” he salutes, turning tail sharply out the door and down the corridor, in the direction of the elevator that stops on the private levels. Once he’s out of earshot he affords himself the laugh at tables rightly turned, and has a thought of eventually thanking her for being able to read him so well and slowly work away at the layers of his post-serum shyness.

* * *

 

Clint is in half a hurry to be nowhere important at all, but he stops mid-stride when he catches Darcy blushing furiously out of the corner of his eye. He comes around quietly behind her, and then claps both hands over her shoulders. She squeaks in surprise and turns around to face him, and he laughs properly at her expense.

       “You are four different shades of embarrassed, peaches,” he tells her. She stutters and stumbles and sort of flails her hands at him, generally not getting anywhere at all. “C’mon, doll face,” he needles her, “I’ve never seen you blush like that.” He pauses while Darcy looks vacantly past his shoulder. “Except for that one time when Thor found--”

       “Shut up!” she snaps out of her reverie with a glare that has him choking back another laugh. It’s a ghost of something that Natasha might throw his way, and on Darcy it looks childish. “We don’t talk about that!”

        “Okay,” he holds his hands up in a mock surrender, “not talking about it. But we are talking about …” he trails off so she can fill in the blanks for him.

        “Steve,” she mutters. Because Clint and Darcy are equal insomniacs when Natasha’s out on solo assignments – Clint worries about Natasha, and Natasha has put Darcy in charge of worrying about Clint, not that she wasn’t already worrying, because she’s a superhero babysitter; it’s her job to worry – it also means that Clint is privy to what she calls her ridiculous, girly crush.

        “Did what?”

         Darcy lets her head fall against his chest, and though they’ve been standing in the middle of the hallway the whole time, what little foot traffic there is has simply slipped past them. “Nothing,” she mumbles, and it sounds a lot more like _nffging._

         “He did nothing and it made you blush this bad?”

          Darcy groans, but Clint thinks it might be a ‘yes’.

          Steve chooses that moment to appear at the other end of the hallway, having apparently taken the stairs – twelve flights, both ways – instead of the elevator. Clint, had he been younger, might have groaned on Darcy’s behalf. Instead, he turns her around by her shoulders and whispers under the guise of pressing a discreet kiss into her hair. “Go get ‘em, tiger.” She groans again, but this time Steve is in earshot.

         “What’s that for?” Like he’s completely clueless about what the boots and the tight jeans and the leather jacket do for him. _He probably is,_ Darcy thinks, _considering how much of a fight it was to update the khakis and suspenders._

         “Clint was boosting morale,” she says, jerking a thumb over her shoulder. When she turns back around, however, he’s already long gone. “Jesus,” she mutters at his absence. Steve’s eyebrows are nearly up to the edge of his beanie, but he does know about Clint’s fondness for the ventilation system.

         “And what do we need morale for?” Steve asks as they head to the elevators.

         “Oh,” Darcy lies fluently. “I just realised the subway will be pretty ugly by now. Commuters.” She says, like it’s a dirty word. It’s nowhere near the class of Natasha or Clint’s lying, but she’s a babysitter, not a spy. She pushes the call button half a dozen times, impatient, and she can practically hear Steve thinking. Before she says so, however, the doors ding open, and Steve follows her in.

         “We could…” he says a little shyly; here’s the Steve that Darcy likes to tease. “We could take my bike, if you wanna skip the subway?”

          Darcy rounds on him with wide eyes. “Seriously?” She is not going to squeak again, dammit.

          “Yeah,” he says, body language all _aw, shucks_. “Pepper was really insistent that I get a second helmet now that SHIELD’s declared it road-safe.” Natasha had been pretty insistent, too, come to think of it. His question gets the reaction he was looking for – Darcy’s like a kid in a candy shop.

          “Awesome!” she declares, bouncing a little on the toes of her boots. She’s also grateful that she was going for ‘garage chic’ with today’s outfit: thick knit tights and heavy boots balanced by a flannel shirt, oversized cardigan, and her own leather jacket and wool scarf. _Bonus points for cute and functional_ , she thinks.

          Once the elevator speeds them down to the garage level, Steve places a hand on her back to gently guide her past all the SHIELD SUVs and sedans, until they get to a limited access doorway. He puts his other hand flat against an ordinary stretch of the cement wall, but to Darcy’s mild surprise it flashes blue under his palm. The light last for the count of five seconds, and as it fades, Steve says, “Jarvis? I’ve got Darcy with me.” The AI responds politely, and Darcy doesn’t even bother to triangulate where the speakers could possibly be.

          “Of course, Captain. Ms. Lewis, would you please place your hand on the panel?”

          Darcy and Steve share a look, but despite the mutual skepticism she places her hand on the wall in the best approximation of what Steve just did. It feels like regular, rough concrete under her palm, but the mystery light glows green and the sleek doors swish quietly open. Scant seconds after they pass through it glides closed behind them, and they continue a dozen steps in to the private garage. The bike is only a dozen or so paces away from the door, and as they approach, Steve asks, “Jarvis, why the new protocol?” He pulls two helmets and two pairs of gloves from a tack box just beside the bike. As Darcy is pulling on her gloves, Steve stashes her little purse in one of the saddle bags.

          Jarvis nearly seems to hum and haw before deciding how to answer Steve, and Darcy finds it both endearing and ridiculous that the ever-ready computer has a personality. “Three days ago, Agents Barton and Romanoff entered a bet, which Agent Barton has since lost. I feel it best not to disclose the details of their arrangement, Captain.”

         There is a spotlight over each individual vehicle in the garage; Darcy can only just make out the edges of sleek chrome on Clint’s Impala, to the left and maybe another dozen paces away, still hidden outside of the bike’s isolated illumination. “Oh, dear,” she mumbles to herself.

         “Quite right, Ms. Lewis.” Jarvis, for a computer, sounds as circumspect as Darcy feels.

         Steve is already settled on the bike with his helmet in place, though the visor is still propped up. He gestures for her to put hers on too, and she does so, a little wary of the muffled silence she’s anticipating. Steve’s voice is a sudden and unexpected intrusion, carrying over the intercom. “We’ve got Jarvis in here too, Darce,” he says by way of explanation. With that, he flicks his visor closed, and playfully adds, “Hop on!”

         Darcy doesn’t think that hopping is really going to get her very far, but she steps as close to the bike as possible and swings one leg wide, up, behind, and over the pillion. Steve twists, reaching behind himself to put a steadying hand on her waist, gently supporting her as she shifts her weight and clambers on. Once she’s settled behind him, Darcy lets out an ‘ _oomph!’_

        “All good?” Steve asks, and she can hear the smile in his voice.

        “All systems go, Captain,” she replies.

        Steve chuckles and lightly grabs her hands, and Darcy manages to feel only slightly overwhelmed by the surround-sound effect of the helmet. He wraps her arms securely around his waist, and follows up by wrapping both hands around her knees and pulling her forward, flush against him. The movements are quick and efficient; he clearly doesn’t mean to make her heart jump with the hurried touches. “Hang tight,” he says, almost sounding like his hero alternate, “lean with me, and don’t let the engine startle you.”

        “The engine?” Darcy wonders, only to be caught off-guard by the roar and snarl of what is surely a prehistoric beast. That the bike is vibrating enough to make her teeth rattle is something else entirely. Steve only chuckles again, and she realises her limbs had turned into vices around him. She realises, too, that he sounds more carefree than she’s ever heard before. She feels him toe away the kickstand and give the engine a gentle, roaring rev.

       “Let’s take the west exit, hey J?”

       As the bike rolls forward, the vibrations become easier to bear, and Steve asks sincerely, “No seconds thoughts? Cold feet?”

       Her own laugh surprises her. “No way! Let’s go!”

       She doesn’t know it, but he smiles with her, gunning the engine a little more than necessary as they roll through and out of the garage, merging into early afternoon Midtown traffic. They follow the flow of the taxis and private cars for a few easy blocks; Steve weaves smoothly between lanes, makes a circle around the block so she can get used to the tilt and weight of the bike. When they hit their first red light, Steve revs down and puts a boot on the asphalt, and then the same hand on Darcy’s knee. “Alright, boss,” he says, with a thick mimicry of his old Brooklyn accent, “where we goin’?”

        Darcy replies, laughing, “Upper West Side, ninety-first and Broadway.”

       “Okay,” he shifts his weight back to centre as the light goes green above them. He’s picturing the city in his mind, going southwest at the interchange just to avoid all the stops and starts on Broadway. _It’ll take a little longer,_ he reasons to himself, _but Darcy will like a smoother trip._

* * *

 

Parking is another matter entirely, but the benefit of the bike is that it’s easy enough to find six square inches to put it on. _In comparison to regular New York parking at any rate_ , Steve thinks. He helps her down from the bike and Darcy doesn’t make mention that her legs feel a little like jello. She does, however, bemoan helmet hair. Steve ‘psshaws’ at her – seriously – and then asks, “The Kosher Market?” The implied question there is: _You’re Jewish?_

         “Hells yeah,” she says, but he interrupts before Darcy can go any further, because he distinctly remembers pizza with bacon on it.

         “You’re not kosher, though. Are you?” and Darcy shushes him fiercely as the walk in. It’s mostly catering and produce-to-go at the front, but the distinctly sweet honey smell of fresh challah wafts through the whole shop.

         “Doesn’t matter,” she says with some conspiracy, “I can pretend.”

         Steve looks at her with a face that she categorises between _Jeeze Louise_ and _You’re fooling no one._ Even so, he picks up a basket, in which Darcy suddenly deposits fresh figs, a cheese he doesn’t immediately recognise – it is packaged entirely in Hebrew – several lemons, and a small baggie of poppy seeds. He didn’t even see her collect them. The _Jeeze Louise_ expression is firmly in place as she drags him into the bakery section, and her exaggerated actions soon have him laughing.

        When they make it to the counter, they both stop their antics and breathe deeply, the warm bakery smell dominating the corner. “It’s Friday,” Darcy says, like that explains everything, “fresh challah.” She points to the beautifully golden loaves of braided bread.

       “Darcy!” yells a voice behind them.

        Both turn around, and a young woman only a little older than Darcy barrels into her. Darcy lets out a small shriek, and suddenly the two women and hugging and bouncing and speaking so fast that underneath all the dark, curly hair, he can’t really tell them apart unless he looks at their shoes.

        When they part, both women are wearing huge, matching grins. They apparently blasted through all the pleasantries while under all their hair, because the first thing the stranger says is, “Hi! I’m Gen!” Her voice is bright and friendly. Steve means to take her hand gently, but she’s in for a proper shake that, two months ago, would’ve startled Steve to blushing.

        “Gen and I went to high school together, and we stayed in touch even though I went to Culver,” Darcy supplies. Then she adds, “Gen, this is Steve.”

         Gen suddenly has a glint in her eyes that makes Steve vaguely nervous. “Stay right there,” she says, “I’ll go get Mr. Gold.”

         Darcy starts to protest, but everything she says is shushed by Gen’s flailing hands. “He’s here?” Darcy asks weakly.

         Gen wrinkles her nose. “Of course, you putz,” she calls over her shoulder as she heads back into the bakery, “it’s Friday!” _Again_ , Steve thinks, _like that explains everything._

         Darcy shuffles, half-hiding herself behind Steve, and he wraps an arm around her shoulders, not really sure what they’re in for. “Mr. Gold is her uncle. We used to just call him ‘Uncle’ until her grandfather passed away, and he took over the shop. It’s been run by ‘Mr. Golds’ for four generations,” she says quietly. “He’s a little… intense. You’ll see.”

        They only stood there for a few short moments before a voice roars out from the shadows behind the counter. “ _Darcy!_ Darcy is back in New York, you say? The world has been righted!” Out steps someone Steve would call a ‘small’ man, if not for the fact that he is as round as he is tall. Bald as an egg, wearing coke-bottle glasses and a well-abused apron, he pulls Darcy out from behind Steve like he’s not even there, kissing her on both cheeks. There’s an exchange of pleasantries in Hebrew that he can’t really follow, until the patriarch finally declares, “Enough! Enough.” The girls’ chatter ceases immediately. Mr. Gold levels Darcy with an even stare, and says, “He’s not Jewish.”

        Gen snorts indelicately, Darcy sighs, and Steve doesn’t really know how to react. He hadn’t even been sure if Mr. Gold had noticed him in the first place. He straightens his posture out of habit. “No, sir,” he says.

        Darcy looks at Mr. Gold impatiently. “No, Uncle,” she teases, and Mr. Gold mutters darkly under his breath. “This is Captain Rogers.”

        Steve holds out his hand, saying, “Sir,” and receives the firm, calculating grip he’s expecting.

        “Captain Rogers,” Mr. Gold repeats, suddenly giving Steve a sunny smile from under his glasses, as if Steve’s not-Jewishness is completely forgiven, “peace upon you.”

        “Thank you,” he replies a little awkwardly. Thinking that maybe it’s a translation of the greetings shared earlier, he hastily adds, “and on you, sir.” But Mr. Gold has practically already turned away from him, and is yelling at Darcy over his shoulder as he rounds to the other side of the counter.

        “Alright, alright, Darcy,” he says, “Darcy who came here only for free challah from Uncle because she is beautiful and has a big boyfriend, yeah?” He turns around, holding up two enormous loaves. “Beautiful Darcy breaking my old heart always,” he laments, as if this is a weekly occurrence.

       “We’re not together,” Darcy protests, and Steve feels like he says the words ‘no, sir’ a half-dozen times in quick succession. Gen looks on, frankly appalled, and Mr. Gold’s expression doesn’t change in the slightest. In fact, he mumbles something that sounds like _when the president is Jewish_ and what might be _schmuck._ Gen’s face clearly says ‘appearances are deceiving’, and Steve jumps to the realisation that Darcy has been glued against his side for the entire conversation, his arm still over her shoulders. He almost makes to let her go, but she discreetly wraps an arm around his waist, under his jacket, and lightly squeezes his hip. Her face stays completely neutral. “We’re not,” she repeats, and then adds after a beat, “but I am beautiful, and it is Friday, and it was Sophia Lauren who broke your heart, Uncle, not me.”

* * *

 

Traffic in Midtown late on Friday afternoons is painfully slow and cramped, but Jarvis cues up Mumford and Sons – Steve’s actually quite fond of them – and he and Darcy do their best, and sometimes worst, singing along. When they finally make it back to the tower, Steve carries their groceries up to the community kitchen nearest their floors, and then quietly begs off muffin-making to go to the gym. Darcy does manage to foist nearly half a loaf of challah, cheese, and sliced figs on him before he goes, at the insistence _you have to, it’s Friday!_

         An hour and a half later he’s ravenous, and slams back a warm protein shake fast enough that he doesn’t really taste it. When he wanders back into the gym, Natasha has beaten him to hanging a new punching bag. No one has said as much, but he’s nearly certain that she’s also received some form of super-serum. He’ll never bright it up outright, and is equally certain that she will never volunteer that kind of information, either.

        He gives her an easy smile in greeting, and she returns it by lifting one corner of her mouth. In her books, it’s practically a grin. “Natasha.”

        “Cap,” she says, and her voice is warm and relaxed. She’s perched on the edge of the boxing ring, only a dozen or so paces away from the hanging punching bag. In her workout gear but still fresh-faced, Steve wonders if she’s on her way to the gym nearer her level, divided as it is into tactile and obstacle training. Stark designed a portion of it himself with Hawkeye in mind – the airspace is all slim catwalks and narrow hand and footholds, so the archer can climb to his heart’s content. This lower gym is the running track – portions of it even outside, on converted balconies – the weight studio, and the general sparring and boxing area, intended for hand-to-hand combat, where Steve, Thor, and Natasha excel. Before he can ask if she’s leaving or here to spar with him, she beats him to the punch. Metaphorically.

       “What’s bothering you?” The words pop into the air abruptly, but Natasha’s face hasn’t changed at all, still looking at him with a friend’s concern. At least, Steve likes to think of it that way. Better than being a puzzle, or in Natasha’s books, a mark.

       “I don’t really know,” he says, winding the wraps around his knuckles once more, before working his hands into his gloves.

       “Something from the thirties?” she asks gently, “or something from now?”

        Steve stops for a moment, and remembers why everyone knows Natasha’s their best agent. She can become a puppet, a shadow of her own capabilities; allowing her targets to genuinely think – if they’ve even bothered to pay attention – that they’ve got the upper hand in any scenario, like she hasn’t left the breadcrumbs in place and is only following along for her own ends. He pulls himself away from that train of thought quickly, throwing a few sharp jabs into the bag to ease the sudden tension in his shoulders. “Both,” he says eventually, after stopping for a pause. He uses the back of his wrist to swipe slightly damp hair out of his eyes before continuing. Natasha, silent, watches him for nearly forty minutes, until Steve progresses to the point where his next list is _go shower_ instead of _hit harder._ If she’d said a word during this entire time, they both pretend that he didn’t hear her.

        He dips his chin at her as he retires back to the locker room, and he thinks one eyebrow arches in acknowledgment. The gloves and wraps come away from his hands on autopilot, and he manages to lose himself in thick steam for a peaceful twenty minutes. When he walks back out into the gym, damp and in clean clothes with another protein shake in hand, Natasha has unrolled a yoga mat and is upside-down, pin straight in a perfect handstand. He stops in his tracks, but he must make some noise, or perhaps the door’s nearly silent _whoosh_ as it slides closed is what tips her to his presence. She cracks open one eye and observes him as carefully as he’s looking at her. Finally, she takes a deep, slow breath - _was she even breathing in the first place?_ Steve asks himself – and bends at the hip, setting one foot, and then the other, down onto the mat before springing off her hands and swinging upright, her back to him. She turns gracefully, deceptively quick, and meets his eyes with a smile in hers. He nods his head backwards, in the direction of the exit, and she rolls her mat with a snap of her wrists, swiping her shoes up off the floor nearby. He waits for her, holding the door open politely; they’ve had this conversation: it’s not masculine chivalry, it’s _manners_. They head down the hallway together and Steve decides not to mention her sock feet.

        “Steve?” she says his name once the elevator doors close behind them.

        He doesn’t look at her when he speaks, his peace from the gym lost to a complicated feeling in his belly. “What do you say we get everyone rounded up for a movie, yeah?”

        “All right.”

        She doesn’t even cast him a glance at his sideways request, and it doesn’t help the tight feeling go away. He’s left feeling like he needs to qualify his statement with something, make it a little less abrupt and little more logical. “I just… it’s just… You know, it’s Friday.” _Well done, Cap. Because_ that _really helped your case._ He lets his head fall back against the wall of the elevator with a dull thunk, finally risking a look at his companion; Natasha is looking back at him with steady eyes, like that explains everything.


	3. S is for Stretchy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clint and Natasha make it home in time for Sunday dinner.

They have a routine perfected, four years later. They are the only ones who know each other so well; it was a risk just as every worthwhile thing is. Coulson had been hopeful while Director Fury had been wary; where Coulson saw potential, Fury saw only a dangerous Russian defector and a broken circus runaway. Four years was a long time, however, and willingly or not, SHIELD had created Strike Team Delta out of two people who needed an equal counterpart, nothing more.

         Their covers have been invited to a house party of some tyrant’s son somewhere just north of Istanbul and west of good news. It was suspected that his reckless behaviour coupled with his status as Daddy’s favourite had won him the lottery of getting tangled up with a small fraction of HYDRA’s splintered operations. The delicately tended grapevine suggested that on this night, financial deals and sensitive information would be shared, HYDRA looking to entice the frat-boy into making a buyer out of his father.

         The hotel SHIELD had them in was absolutely gorgeous – befitting the young Russian dancer and her rich, dawdling American boyfriend. Natasza Romanovski was the hottest new thing on the scene, a bombshell out of the Eastern Bloc, famously dripping in diamonds and slipping out from under the arm of her companion to go play with the boys who knew what kind of fun new money could really buy.

         Clark Branford was hot-blooded, bull-headed, and as delicate as a jackhammer. As obnoxious American boys go, he was at the top of the list. According to the social media sites, however, everyone who knew him – and he was generous to his friends, people wanted to know him – said that he’d had the wind knocked out of his sails the night he crossed paths with the dancer. Rumours said that Daddy didn’t care; he was glad Clark had finally learned what beauty might mean, but was generally too busy making underhanded oil deals to pay so much attention to his second son.

         It was the same old story.

         Clint and Natasha can play this game in their sleep.

         Four pm, day of, they make a show of themselves in the market’s main square. He buys everything she looks twice at, and she holds his hand and leans into his shoulder and massages her toes into his calf while they’re at an open-air café, just to watch him shift in his seat. They make their way slowly back to the hotel, chatting softly, American vowels rounding over Russian consonants.

         “You won’t tell me what you got me for my birthday, baby?”

         “No.”

         “Not even a hint?”

         It ends with the sloppy kiss of a young couple perfectly aware they’re not playing by high society’s rules. They talk softly, and she keeps her accent in place even after they’ve locked the door to their room, arguing about ice cream flavours until they’ve cleared the room for intruders, wireless bugs, and booby traps.

         “Keep the earrings, will you?” Clint asks, flopping face-down into the expansive mattress as Natasha moves past him, into the bathroom, turning the taps to draw a bath.

         “Why?” she calls back, voice American and husky once again.

         “Because they’re nice,” he mumbles into the silky duvet before rolling onto his back. “And they’re nice on you.”

         “Fool,” he hears over the rush of the water, but she doesn’t say anything else. He knows she’s starting her half of their routine, so he waits for a breath and then sits upright before going to do his part. He crosses the room to the closet in three short strides, opening the sliding doors and pulling out the pieces of his suit from where they hang. Jacket, pants, a dress shirt with French cuffs and an American button-down collar, and a tie an inky shade of blue that Natasha’s picked out for him lay across his side of the bed in no time. His holsters and hidden quiver he lays out neatly beside the clothes. Set on his bedside table is the ankle holster for his smallest collapsible bow. It shouldn’t be necessary, but Stark’s been playing with designs and Clint’s itching to test it.

         He takes greater care with Natasha’s holsters, laying them out in order on her pillow. He sets the tightly rolled fabric case of her knives on her bedside table, but leaves it closed – she will methodically double check each blade as she straps it in while they get dressed. Old habits die hard deaths if they ever die at all, he reasons. Going back to the closet, he snags her heels – at least, the ones he’s sincerely hoping she’ll wear tonight – glossy black leather booties with heels as long as her favourite knife. Then, reaching back into the closet, he gingerly pulls out the red dress bag hanging near the back. _Not the black one!_  She’d yelled once, when they were still early in their partnership. At the time he hadn’t asked what was in it; now, he didn’t need to, knowing her so well.

         He hangs the bag on a hook on the door, quickly gliding down the zip and pulling out the dress to hang freely. It’s a midnight shade of silk, the same colour as his tie, and so crusted in stones and deeply cut on both sides that he’s not immediately certain which is the business end. He images for a breath what it will look like on her, and decides that doesn’t really matter.

         Leaving it hanging, he makes his way around the room to join Natasha in the bathroom, efficiently stripping off as he goes. Her cosmetics are already neatly arranged on the marble countertop, her lingerie laid out carefully on the upholstered chair in the corner.  She’s already in the bath, up to her shoulders in the cloudy, fragrant water. It smells of honey and ginger and citrus and sand; Clint assumes it was one bath bomb of a whole basket they’d purchased that afternoon. As he slips into the tub behind her, he decides it’s not an unmanly way to smell. She shifts closer against him, and Clint lets his hands wander for a moment. She’s all lush, soft curves over taunt, lean muscles, and he knows with certainty there is no blade in her collection nearly as sharp as her mind.

         Natasha stretches out, feeling warm and confident and in control. She reaches out with one delicate foot and toes on the hot tap, letting it run to steaming before she slips out of Clint’s relaxed arms. She holds a fresh face towel under the stream until her hands are pink, and then she passes it back to Clint. He takes it without opening his eyes, draping it over his neck and chin while she retrieves a cake of soap, a badger-hair bristle brush, and a straight razor with an intricately etched handle. They don’t speak at all as she lathers the brush, then his face, or even as she starts to run the blade in smooth strokes over his cheeks. Under the water, their legs are tangled together, and he brackets her hips firmly so there’s no weight behind her hands. The process is smooth, quick; she watches her work and he watches her. The cloth, now only warm, is discarded, hanging over Clint’s shoulder. When she’s finished, he uses it to wipe away the feeling of the lather, though there’s not a trace of it left.

         Clint takes in the sight of her, flaming hair done in a careless knot, loose bits curling damply around her ears and neck. “Tasha?” he asks.

         She deliberates, nods, and then turns her back to him, and he gently plucks out two pins, depositing them in her waiting palm. He cradles her head in his hands as she leans back into the water, thoroughly soaking the strands. Natasha’s eyes close as he works through the odd tangle, and she lets her mind wander as the pads of his fingers massage her scalp. This is why they work so well together, this is why they can even function alone as scarred as they are; Natasha is the one who will dress, check and double check her weapons – and his – and she will be Natasza who walks out of their hotel into the sticky night air. She will be Widow who fulfils the mission’s parameters, and she will be Agent Romanoff when her report lands her in Fury’s private office. But here, in the bath in Istanbul, with Clint gently working the lather through her hair, she’s just _Tasha_ and no one else.

* * *

 

Natasza is a vision in diamonds and silk, looking for all intents and purposes like a modern Venus fresh out of the ocean. Clark happily accompanies her; her hapless, adoring shadow. No one, it seems, can remember much about him, other than that he’s American and wouldn’t leave her side. They play their cards right – of course they do – and soon enough their host has them accidentally and permanently separated.

         Natasza teases the young men who accompany her, saying things like _if you can breathe, you can dance_ and at their insistence that she be the one to dance for them, _but I never dance alone._ Eventually, she has them in a smaller sitting room, expensive furniture hastily pushed aside to make space as the music thumps through the walls. Blended in with all her jewelry is a smaller, gilded Widow’s Bite, its standard contents replaced with a solution that should buy her twenty seconds, though likely less, she calculates, considering how much these men have been drinking as they drunkenly stumble through a series of steps, passing her off from one to the other. She plays along, having the time of her life, managing to prick all three in quick succession. When the first one sits down heavily, she taunts and teases and says since they can’t keep up, she’s going to run to the bathroom. She locks the door behind her, slinking up the stairs, past the washroom, and into a bedroom where a laptop sits on the bed, glowing and unattended. As she plugs in a discreet little flash drive, she can make out the sounds of three distinct thumps and the crash of a bottle as the bodies go down.

         When the obnoxious American suggests they all go to the roof for a smoke, the team of thugs assigned to befriend and occupy him feel like their job is taking care of itself. All eight of them take the terrace steps, and while they’re all thinking it would be fun to throw him off then and there, they’d have more fun taking the piss out of him first.

         Twenty minutes later, Clark, unruffled, is the only one to descend the staircase. He meets his beauty near the entrance, and they take the back alleys until they find a busy intersection, hailing a cab to another hotel on the other side of the city. The QuinJet, Coulson inside, meets them in an abandoned parking lot another few miles west. Natasha hands over the USB, and Coulson tries not the think about the newspapers in the morning. The body count wasn’t supposed to have been so high, but circumstances dictated broader nets and reasonable force. Besides, no one really expects Strike Team Delta to follow any rules but their own. Astounding avionics technology – and the fact that someone let Clint into the pilot’s seat – means that they’re back in New York only four hours and one International Date Line later, just in time for Avenger’s family Sunday dinner.

* * *

 

         Instilled by Cap’s upright family values and backed by Dr. Banner’s enforcement, the whole fam-damily comes together on Sunday nights when the supervillains allow it. Given that Darcy and Clint are actually whizzes in the kitchen certainly boosts attendance. The biggest surprise to the casual observer, however, might be that out of the nine regular attendees, Thor is the only one among them who can make a decent loaf of bread by hand. Pepper wonders to herself when Norse gods being domestic in Tony’s kitchen became her definition of a quiet night in.  She’s off to one side, humming and hawing over which wine will best match dinner and still please everyone’s taste buds. Clint and Natasha have just radioed in, via Jarvis, that they’re only twenty minutes and a quick freshening-up away. She could hear Coulson complaining the in the background about unfiled reports, and Clint barks back something like, “I’m _flying_!” in a tone that distinctly says he couldn’t find it in him to care at all. To her left, Dr. Banner is patiently setting the table – they don’t ask him to chop onions any more – and Tony is at his shoulder, mouth going a mile a minute and gesticulating in a way that doesn’t normally leave the workshop.

         Darcy, bless her, Pepper thinks, corrals Tony back to his station at the barbeque because Steve, for the life of him, simply can’t process a computerized grill and those steaks should have been flipped forty seconds ago and she really, really doesn’t want for Jarvis to get involved because that will only unsettle poor Steve all the more. The AI, reading her mind, butts in anyway.

        There’s a sound a little like a cough, and Pepper wants to laugh, because Jarvis doesn’t have a throat to clear, and he’s definitely picked up that social cue from Bruce. “Prince Thor,” he calls delicately – Steve nearly jumps out of his skin anyway – but just loud enough to be heard over the general hubbub of Darcy talking to herself and Tony thinking to himself and Clint and Natasha walking in the door at that moment, apparently finalising an argument with their eyebrows. The AI’s new choice of honorific has everyone stopping in the tracks, the two assassins even stumbling in sync under the kitchen’s archway. “Dr. Foster has returned early from Norway and wishes to see you at once.”

        Thor had been moping since Jane left ten days ago, and with her planned return only days away, his mood of late had certainly lifted, though it didn’t compare at all to the light in his eyes now. He had been slouching over the railing of the balcony, sipping a beer and generally being morose. His suddenly improved mood fills the space, and even though he’s been in the kitchen all evening, it seems surprisingly smaller as he strides in, big-chested and grinning. His previously hunched shoulders are thrown back, and it makes a remarkable difference on a man his size. “Pray tell, friend, where shall I find her?” he booms, making Darcy look comically small beside him as he places his empty bottle in the sink with a muffled clatter. Pepper gives him some credit – he’s had no major incidents with glassware since his arrival, despite the reputation preceding him.

        “Dr. Foster is presently in your apartments, my lord.”

        Thor moves through the group with the ease of a cat despite his bulk, and it appears to Pepper that even in such a rush as he is, royal manners prevail. When he reaches Clint and Natasha in the archway, he catches each by a shoulder before they can turn to let him pass, looking at them in turn.

        “It is an eve of glad tidings that returns you soundly to us,” he says, in what might be the lowest possible volume he has. He calls back over his shoulder to the room at large, “With haste I take my leave of you,” though it may be more directed at Jarvis than anyone else. If seven-foot tall Norse gods could scamper, Pepper would think of no other way to describe as he hurries down the corridor.

        “Yo, J,” Tony says, breaking the startled silence. “What’s with the name-calling?”

        “It has come to my attention, sir, that Prince Thor is more accustomed to being addressed as such when in a home environment. I was only taking initiative.”

        “Yeah, okay, Daddy’s proud,” Tony mutters impatiently. Pepper takes a seat at the table with Natasha, Clint, and Bruce. Darcy brings over a steaming platter of vegetables from the stove, but Steve is one step behind her and has already pointedly pulled out her chair before she can head back to the counter. They argue with their facial expressions – more that Darcy silently blusters and Steve merely stands firm against it – and she finally sits while everyone else pretends to have not carefully watched the whole exchange. Steve even pushes her chair in before heading out to the barbeque, where he returns from with the steaks and an enormous pile of foil-wrapped baked potatoes. Tony is the last to the table, as always, carrying fresh, icy bottles of beer for him, Steve, and Clint. Tony and Clint are simply too stubborn to have anything over than beer with beef, and Steve, despite processing the alcohol too quickly, has found that a decent IPA goes nicely with dinner. Darcy voices what’s she’s sure everyone is dying to ask. “Does that make Jane a princess?”

        Clint answers, “If they get married,” at the same time Natasha says, “When they get married,” and Bruce, on Natasha’s right, looks uncomfortable.

        “Correct me if I’m wrong, Jarvis,” Pepper says as the wine and bread get passed around, “but Thor isn’t just a crown prince. He’s the heir.”

        “That is correct, Ms. Potts.”

        Darcy asks if there’s any difference at the same time that Tony mumbles something like _that’s correcting her when she’s correct_. Steve is trying very hard not to laugh into his beer.

        “There is,” Pepper confirms, before delicately going back to her steak. For all Steve’s earlier troubles, he’d done a wonderful job with them. There’s still approximately half a cow on the table, however, because Thor has apparently abandoned his portion.

        Clint and Natasha whisper and snipe at each other as they are inclined to do, but the general noise of the table in Thor and Jane’s absence belongs to Tony and Darcy as they banter over everything. Neither will admit it when pressed, but they’re actually quite fond of each other. Pepper listens to the cadence of Tony’s voice as it rises and falls, warm and slightly gruff. Her heels have been discarded for the evening, and she is resolutely not thinking about fundraisers or charities or museum openings or snide lawyers. All of that can wait for Monday morning; it’s coming soon enough. Right now, instead, she focuses on maybe having one more glass of wine; Tony’s warm hand discreetly resting on her thigh – he can manage to be discreet when he really, really means to; the smiles on the faces that have become familiar even in the face of the farce they tend to orchestrate. This wild little tangle of superheroes still learning how to get along and who, so slowly that none really seemed to notice, are suddenly the ones she turns to for the comfort of a family dinner.

* * *

 

          By the time Steve has pushed away his plate – he’s not shy about extra helpings any more, and he takes the ‘growing boy’ teasing as the light-hearted affection it’s meant to be – and Bruce has persuaded Natasha into trying a new tea blend he’s just discovered, it’s clear that Thor and Jane are not coming to the table tonight. Usually attendance is pretty strictly enforced – Pepper thinks she and Bruce make an effective team – but the pair has a tendency to distract each other to the extent of hilarity. Pepper, Clint, and Natasha deal with clean up while Bruce and Tony try to do science at the dining room table. Steve and Darcy have swanned off, and seeing how Tony apparently hasn’t noticed yet, everyone unanimously elects not to mention it.

           Once the leftovers are stashed and Clint and Natasha have gone for a post-mission movie and unwinding on their floor, Pepper gently butts into Tony and Bruce’s conversation. If she’s being honest, though, there’s not so much talking as there are fragments of sentences that leave her completely at a loss.

           “What about --”

           “Yeah, opacity, if --”

           “Density when compressed --”

           “Great.”

           “Transparent when --”

           “Not great.”

           “Maybe some kind of nano-netting?”

           “ _Quantum mesh?”_ Pepper’s sure that one’s sarcastic, though.

           “I need --”

           “Measurements, yeah --”

           “Especially dimensions of --”

           “Measurements, yeah,” repeated more forcefully.

           “Any enhancements?”

           “Taken --”

           “Yeah, taken care of.”

           There’s some impatient hand-flailing on Tony’s part.

           “So, what you’re --”

           “We are!”

           “-- you’re saying is you don’t --”

           “Care.”

           “Just in time for?”

           “Don’t.”

           “Done for Chanukah? Kwanzaa? Dia de los meurtos?”

           “That’s in October.”

           “Oh. Well.”

           “Black?”

           “Yeah, I don’t --”

           “Uniform, got it --”

           “I don’t --”

           “I know.”

            It’s at that point that Tony notices Pepper. Better, acknowledges her. He’s likely noticed as soon as she was within his ten-foot personal bubble, but only at this lull in conversation does he stop scratching at a napkin with a greasy pencil and turn to look at her, smiling wide and true. She looks at him warmly, and he replies, “We’re making --” but Bruce cuts him off.

            “No, we’re not --”

            “Bruce a pair of --”

            “No, we’re not --”

            “Super-strength --”

            “Stark.”

            “Hulk-resistant --”

            “ _Tony._ ”

            “Pants!”

            Pepper smiles politely at Tony before turning an apologetic eye to Bruce. He catches her look and grins despite himself. “Nano-pants,” he says, completely on board the self-deprecation train and blushing behind his teacup. Pepper nods sagely, herself long familiar with embarrassment at the hands of Tony Stark.

            “I was going to suggest,” she says lightly, before Tony can get his second wind and design _her_ a pair of nano-whatevers, “that we should head up to the lounge, on Tony’ floor. Everyone else has already cleared away for the evening.”

            Tony looks aghast. “What about dessert?”

            “Missed it,” she says, falsely apologetic. Tony pouts dramatically and lets out a genuine laugh. Pepper pretends to take pity on him. “Maybe we’ll get you something in the middle of the night.”

            The face goes from childish sulk to pure lechery in no time at all. “Maybe I’ll get _you_ something in the middle of the night.” It would have been a juvenile response, but Tony waggles his eyebrows so suggestively and pitches his voice an entire octave lower. Bruce’s humour is quickly evaporating, and Pepper can feel the embarrassment coming off him in waves.

            “ _Tony._ ”

            “What?” he grins innocently, like he doesn’t know what it is he’s done to deserve that tone of voice from her. Pepper pours herself a small cup of tea from Natasha’s abandoned pot, replying without looking at either of them.

            “You’re embarrassing,” she says, in a voice that is fond and exasperated.

            “Who?” he protests. “I’m not embarrassed, you’re not embarrassed; Bruce is _trying_ to be embarrassed but knows better,” he says blithely, ignoring how the doctor is shifting uncomfortably in his seat. “The last time there was some decent embarrassment around here was that time when Thor found --”

            “Tony!” his companions shout in unison. Pepper’s voice is tired, Bruce sounds scandalised.

            He picks up a different track of conversation like he’s already forgotten what they’re talking about. “Jarvis, do I embarrass you?”            

            “Without fail, sir,” comes the answer, and Tony throws his hands up in mock disgust.

            “Thing is,” he says, as he stands up from the table in a huff, “thing is, is that you can’t be embarrassed. Not with the life I used to lead, and certainly not now.” He blazes on, and while Pepper is familiar with Tony’s unlikely gems of social enlightenment, Bruce is clearly in over his head. “The media is a monster when it comes to shame and humiliation, and they will eat you alive, but that’s got nothing, _nothing_ , on how you can ruin yourself from the inside out. So figure it out,” he says, his wandering gaze finally settling on Bruce. “Pep’s been a mix of exasperated and adoring for ten years now,” he shoots her a bemused look that says _of course I noticed_ , “because there’s no room in this frame for embarrassment.”

            Tony is up on his feet, having paced the breadth of the kitchen while he was speaking. When he finishes, he’s standing under the archway and looking impatient. Pepper sips her tea. Bruce is a little shell-shocked. “We going?” he asks, throwing a thumb over his shoulder.

            Pepper stands, setting aside her teacup and walking over to press a small kiss to Tony’s cheek and petting his shoulder. “We’ll be right there,” she says, “go put a movie on.”

            Tony nods once, and then inclines his head, fishing for a second kiss. Pepper grants it, and he waggles his eyebrows one last time before he saunters away. “If you take longer than the start menu I’m going to the shop,” he threatens.

            “We’ll be right there,” Pepper calls to his retreating form, and then says more quietly to Bruce, “You okay?”

            He nods absently, standing up and collecting the now-cold teapots and teacups. When they’re rinsed out in the sink, he looks back at her. “That was quite a speech,” he says eventually, rubbing the back of his neck.

            “I forward the good ones to his speechwriters on occasion,” she explains, waiting for the doctor by the archway, Louboutins in hand. Bruce looks skeptical. “Not that he ever reads them, but…”

            His brow creases, and he blurts out, “What if he’s in the shower?” and then proceeds to get so red that Pepper shoves down her own surprise and graciously pretends that she didn’t hear him as they walk out of the kitchen. Where the idea comes from, she understands – scientists and enlightenment in the shower seem to be a theme, if a frequently wet-haired Jane Foster is anything to go by. She doesn’t tell him those little speeches _she_ generally jots down by hand once they’re dry. That is, of course, when the revelations actually have some scientific or cultural merit, and aren’t just Tony’s exaltations over the wonder that is her corporeal form. It’s fifty-fifty, but she just smiles a soft smile and keeps that to herself.


	4. Tell Me Your Story

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jane is back from Norway with a beautiful, promising, dangerous discovery under her arm. She and Thor have a midnight visitor.
> 
> For overall progression of this story, and potential concerns and triggers, please read the notes.

People clear out of his path with amused panic on their faces, but Thor pays them no mind. He bypasses the elevator entirely, instead taking the stairs, propelling himself up the steps three at a time. The four flights devolved into a dozen giant strides, but it does nothing to dampen his energy and excitement. When he makes it to their floor, he calls out, “Jarvis, friend!” passing by Jane’s small, personal lab. She and Dr. Banner share the space on the floor above theirs, but this lab extends out to the balcony, where Jane has set up a small but high-powered telescope. The ceiling of the lab is covered in star maps, and Thor smiles to recollect pictures of Jane stretched out flat on her back, just staring up at the constellations. “Grant my passage freely; I have no patience for the Man of Iron’s endless precautions. I have been without my love too long, and I beg you permit me this.”

       The lock on the door releases and clicks open without further pressing, and Thor reaches to it, bursting into the apartment like joy personified. The foyer is empty, save for a few unpacked crates; packing peanuts litter the floor and cling to the crates with static, and after a single sweeping glance, Thor pays it no mind. He races through the open dining area and the living room. Rain patters happily against the windows when before Jane’s arrival there were only the usual low, dark clouds. The leather furniture gleams in the dim light, and he lightly springs over the coffee table rather than waste time following the maze of the space. He finally, finally appears in the wide entrance to the bedroom, finding Jane perched on the foot of his bed – their bed – belongings strewn everywhere, clothes halfway between suitcases and dressers and closet. Her tall boots have flopped over themselves without support at the foot of the bed. Thor had noticed her heavy felted coat on the kitchen counter from the corner of his eye, but she’d obviously been distracted by something, still wrapped up as she is in a scarf nearly as long as he is tall.

       Her attention jumps to him as he comes into the room, for all his size and excitement not making enough noise to pull her from her focus. When their eyes lock, their faces are split into matching, happy grins, and Jane leaps up so she’s standing on the mattress. Thor approaches the foot of the bed in three massive strides, arms open to receive her as Jane launches herself at him. The spring from the mattress causes an improbably high stack of books to tumble, but neither notice.

       He holds Jane tightly to his chest and she wraps her arms around his neck, and they are both smiling too foolishly wide to share a proper kiss. The embrace dissolves into honest laughter even as Jane’s feet dangle far from the ground. Thor swings her around in a wide circle until his back is to the bed, and then he backs up slowly until his calves find the mattress and he sits, still holding Jane tight.

       Too happy to speak, Jane settles into his lap, peppering kisses over his lips, cheeks, and jaw. Thor feels the contentment he was so sorely missing, his chest full and heavy and for a moment, his throat is tight with the words he cannot voice. It passes, and when Jane finds his lips again he catches them in a deep and patient kiss. She clings to his shoulders and he holds her, one arm heavy behind her back as his free hand tugs her scarf. She breaks away after a moment, sucking in deep breaths as Thor works his way down the stretch of exposed skin on her neck. Small hands tangle fiercely in his hair and the tightness from minutes before leaves his throat to settle warm and rolling, low in his belly. Jane tugs him back up to her mouth, feeling possessive and hungry. Thor’s free hand is now trailing down her side, knuckles brushing against the gentle swell of her breast before coming to rest against her hip, warm and strong, holding her to him. It ignites her focus and she slows their kiss. Eventually, she pulls away, but not before taking his lower lip between her teeth and biting softly. Thor’s chest swells under her in response and when Jane looks in his eyes, they are the darkest blue she’s ever seen them; wide pupils ringed in indigo in the warm light. She feels the smile creep back into place, the corners of her lips turning up ceaselessly.  She takes advantage of his steady grip and quickly yanks her bungled scarf over her head, feeling wickedly overheated under his gaze. She throws it carelessly behind her, and it catches on her boots, both articles toppling to the floor with a dull thunk.

       Thor takes in the sight of her in his arms; flushed cheeks and bright eyes and an impish grin in place. “What fair wind brought my love back to me?” he asks her.       

       Jane presses a final chaste kiss against his soft smile, and then crawls forward from his arms, back onto the bed. His shifts to follow her motions, one foot braced against the floor. He draws his other leg up, his knee under him, and watches her as she sifts through the fallen pile of paper and books. Shoving several thick volumes aside, she finally digs up a closed folder, stuffed to busting with loose pages of her tiny, scrawling handwritten notes. The glossy sheen of printed photographs he’s learned to recognise peek out from between sheets, their corners buffed and folded from manhandling.

       She holds it up like a trophy before turning her attention back to him. “This did,” she says excitedly. She flops out flat on her belly, spreading the notes and photographs out between them on the silky duvet. The odd item out is a bulky, over-folded piece of paper, and it unfolds endlessly until it smothers the space between them, all the other documents buried. Jane orients it to face him, and when she speaks, she is still just as excited, though calmer. “This is the current sky over Norway,” she says.

       He nods, tracing a finger over the outlines and patterns. “They are familiar constellations, aye.” She makes an impatient gesture, and he helps her flip over the paper to its opposite side. The new images are blocky, looking less like a map and more like a small child’s drawing. He says so.

       “You’re right,” she agrees, “but look at the constellations again.”

       He does so, in greater detail this time, and sees what he thinks she’s asking him to find. Though they are stiff renderings, they are the same stars. It’s slightly skewed, and some of the smaller, dimmer stars are completely absent, but it is very much the same. That given, Thor notices the two most prominent constellations are actually in the same place as on the other side’s map, and there is a line of eight other bright stars dividing the space between them. In fact, even though it’s well off of centre and in its own quadrant, it feels to Thor that it is actually the focal point, and all the other stars and planets have shifted with them as their fulcrum. He traces the imaginary line with a finger and looks at Jane expectantly. “Here,” he says, stilling his hand, “these stars are the focal point; they remain unchanged in either map.”

       Jane smiles at him broadly. “You’re exactly right. But this one,” she taps a pattern into the paper with the pads of her fingers, “isn’t a map.”

       Thor understands that her tone of voice is telling him more than just her words, something else he can’t quite interpret. He plays along. “Is it not?”

       Her eyes are gleaming when she replies. “This is a scaled-down computer-rendering…” he nods, have already anticipated as much, but she continues, “from a full-sized rubbing we took from the ceiling of some kind of ancient holy site. One of the PhDs – another scientist – had a little background in theology. She couldn’t name a particular religion for that region or that far back, but said that given the site’s age, and the state it was in…” She roots around under the spread of the map for a moment, and then pulls out a handful of photographs, turning them to his hands to look at. “It’s obviously a place of worship, probably from the thirteenth century, maybe earlier. We’re hoping to get an archeologist to look at it. It’s easily as old as the Nidaros Cathedral, and that was built in the eleventh century.”

       The pictures so damp stone, black with age. Four rows of stone benches run parallel, divided down the centre to form a narrow aisle. Another photograph shows recesses in the walls of the same black bricks, crevasses and braces where flame torches most have once shone. Another image details the altar – platforms for sacrifices act as a barrier to a deep, stepped well. Exposed in the harsh light of the cameras, the images look nearly unreal. He pauses over the photo of the basin.

       “We _think_ ,” she stresses, “or, well, the geologist – rock scientist I talked to – thinks that there used to be a hot spring under and surrounding the building. It likely has been long dead, but it would explain why it was built in such an unexpected place. The spring, with the right masonry, could keep the building warm; if it fed the basin, it might have been used in their rituals, too.”

       Then she shows him another stack of photographs, but these are obviously taken from the low-hung ceiling. Having seen the copied image, he can pick out the constellations, despite their enormous scale. Jane gently takes the photo in his hand and lines it up with one of the sacrificing altars. “This dividing bit was exactly above the altar,” she whispers.

       He flips over to the modern star map, focusing on the patterns. “I know these constellations,” he says again, “from my youth, when warring and hunting and in legends; they were our guides both day and night. But Jane, I have never with my eyes seen these, never in the stories heard of them.” He traces his finger absently over the eight linear dots.

       Her voice is a whisper. “They’re not there to see,” she replies, and Thor feels a settled kind of confusion. “They can’t be seen by naked human eyes,” she continues, “and you’ve just proven the gods probably couldn’t see them either. We put in a SHIELD-authorised request to the Hubble telescope, and they sent us this.” She holds out a grainy colour print-out, a line of tiny white pinpricks standing against a deep plum background. “It was the best they could give us on twelve hours’ notice. We’ll have something with much better focus and resolution by the end of next week. Maybe even with distance estimates.”

       “They do not shine like stars,” he says to himself. Jane’s spectacular grin is a pleasant surprise.

       “They’re not. The readings are conclusive, even if the images aren’t great. They’re planets.” She points to the top-most dot on the picture. It’s miniscule, but in comparison is nearly twice the size of the others. The very last one in the line is improbably small, and if he wasn’t looking for an eighth, he wouldn’t likely see it. “In fact,” she says in a brave whisper, “I think that’s Asgard.”

       Thor jerks his head up suddenly, and Jane focuses on him completely. The set of her eyes is nervous and determined and even though his heart is pounding in frustration, he loves her in this moment. “Jane,” his voice is serious and his normally joyful face is stony, “what leads you to such an idea?”

       “We were in that part of Norway because of historical weather patterns and ancient legends that suggested it used to be a Bifrost site. When we got there, we found that recent global warming trends had caused a large part of the glacial shelf to retract. The polar ice cap is shrinking. This…” she hunts for the right word, “this chapel, I guess, has literally been buried under ice for maybe as long as nine hundred years. It’s just been thawed out in the last twenty-four months, going by estimates. It’s a miracle that the freeze-thaw of the ice during that time didn’t shatter the structure.” She stops talking, and slips down off the bed. Thor takes her outstretched hand and follows her into the kitchen space, where one of her shoulder bags has been slung over the back of a chair. Jane pulls out her Starkpad, and gestures for him to sit in front of her. He looks up to meet her eyes, and she simply puts the tablet in his open hands. It is already glowing with a cued up image of what looks like ancient text.

       “We found a book.”

       She doesn’t elaborate, and so Thor gently brushes his finger over the screen like he’s been taught. Several images are only text, and the ink is thin, scrawling, and a little waterlogged. It’s far too small to read, but Thor thinks the language, too, is outside of his understanding. With his own small magic he can translate everything around him, but this is a miniaturised, captured image, not a book he can manipulate. Thor is about to shake his head and apologise; if Jane expected him to be able to read it for her, he’s sorry to disappoint her. He flicks half-heartedly to the next frame, lips already forming the words he suddenly cannot bring himself to say. His eyes are fastened to an image he cannot bear to look away from, least of all blink. Done in a style as realistic as possible – unlike the knotted, abstract creations the early Midgardians favoured – Thor is absolutely certain that he is looking at a picture of his mother.

       There is no mistaking the tumbling golden curls held back by a delicate Dwarven-work crown. Its filigree made to seem like the stones within it were floating, suspended, rather than secured in their settings. Her face is open to the artist, but her eyes are downcast to the infant in her arms. His lady mother, Queen of the Aesir, goddess of women and childbirth – and younger than he could ever remember her.

       The fair babe in her arms has the expected light complexion favoured for such paintings: bright blue eyes wide open under wisps of white-blond hair. The Queen is dressed in her familiar icy-blue robes, and Thor wonders how such details could be captured by a Midgardian artist, as unlike her husband, Frigga had never set foot on Midgard. She is a stark contrast to the vibrant red velvet of the child’s swaddle, so very like…

 _No,_ Thor thought. _It simply cannot be so._

       But as surely as it was impossible, the next image struck a real memory. It is again a perfect painting of the Queen cradling an infant, though this one wears dark hair and is cocooned in verdant shade of emerald. Leaning across her lap is a small boy, blond hair tousled and clothes muddy, peering eagerly at the sleeping bundle. Thor wouldn’t believe the image at all if he did not physically possess the memory of that very afternoon, being formally introduced to his little brother for the very first time.

       What the image doesn’t show is significant itself; it was only days after the end of the war, the king deep in the revitalising Odinsleep. Without his father to pester, Thor had spent the whole morning in the stables, learning to care for his horse and handle a sword – though only wooden – from the saddle. He remembers the distinct feeling of wishing his father’s ravens would pass through the yard and give the King the sight of his son, ready to be a warrior king just as he was. The feeling put fuel in his belly until the horsemaster finally sent him away for lunch. Once at the table with his mother, however, his adrenaline left him, and he was suddenly fatigued and frustrated. Hesitant to go back outside – even as a small child he’d known how quickly he could lose his temper, and his pride was always sore after such babyish displays of tired impatience. His mother had seemed to read as much on his face, and when the horsemaster reappeared at the door to the Queen’s chambers, she gently stepped in, saying, “There is someone our young prince needs to meet this afternoon. Gyllir can wait, can he not?”

       Jane is looking at him with careful, open eyes, her bottom lip worried between her teeth like she doesn’t even notice. “At first, we thought it was the Prose Edda, an absolute first edition of it.” Thor sets down the Starkpad, listening to her intently. “The Prose Edda and the Poetic Edda are the two texts that found all our understanding of Norse mythology… of the legends of your people. There are other books and sources, written much later, but all the information is attested for the very first time in of those books.

       “Normally,” she continues, looking for a moment at her hands, “it’s the whole pantheon; stories of hundreds of gods and goddesses, touching on all of them. We can’t read this yet, but the pictures… they’re all of you. Your family. Other gods we think are mentioned, but only in relation to how they affect your story.”

       Thor lets himself slip off the bed to stand back on his feet. That early Midgardians had written of Asgard and its heroes did not surprise him in the least, but Thor had never been to Midgard before his banishment. Nor had Frigga in fact, but there she was, rendered perfectly. It made his skin itch, and he wanted to know how someone from so long ago could have known so much.

       Jane crawls back into the nest of pillows at the head of the bed, plucking a large, particularly fluffy one and squashing it into her lap. He blinks for a moment, suddenly remembering with clarity Sif once doing the exact same thing with a couch cushion after they had been caught out, as small children, on a midnight adventure. He wonders momentarily if, like Jane, she has repeated the habit since her girlhood. Jane pulls the tablet back towards herself like an afterthought, and she softly adds, “There’s more,” not looking at his eyes.

       Her tone is unlike anything he’s heard from her before, and it yanks him from his thoughts. He walks around to the head of the bed where she is, climbing on to join her against the pillows. She skims through images too fast for him to properly consider, but the flashes of the feasting hall, the face of his warrior friend, Lady Sif, and terribly, his own silhouette raising Mjölnir as the Bifrost sings, screams, and shatters. All of it is there. When she finds what she’s looking for, she holds the tablet to her chest for a moment, shielding it from his eyes. Thor reaches out, sweeping a clump of hair from her cheek. “Show me,” he says.

       Jane turns it over to his hands, and he finds himself at a complete loss. The intense eyes looking up at him are the very same ones staring at him from over the edge of the feather pillow. They sit in silence for a moment before Thor speaks. They had yet to speak of the conversation they’d had before she left for her research expedition, they promises they’d made in the night. Thor watches as Jane’s eyes flick back and forth between his own face and her hands in her lap. Her full, delicate mouth is hidden behind the pillow, and he doesn’t know if she’s done this on purpose – he has learned to read her emotions from the set of her mouth. He wonders with a heavy heart if she regrets the words they said and the vows they made before her discovery.

       “My love,” he says, and damns it to Hel if his voice doesn’t crack and pitch. He steels himself, and when he speaks again it feels detached even from his own mouth. “Jane, if you are regretting --”

       Her eyes snap up to him then, and the look she levels him with turns his words to sludge in his mouth, thick and dirty. “Don’t,” she says, pushing the pillow from her lap to tug on his hands instead. “Don’t put words in my mouth,” she explains, “and don’t ever, ever think that I’m giving up. Don’t think that I won’t go down fighting.” She looks at him a moment longer, and then leans herself into his lap. Curled against his chest, she says, “It’s just surreal. Sort of overwhelming to see myself like that, you know? Then to see your childhood and your history; to know things that you haven’t told me for yourself.”

       Thor holds her close to himself, one broad hand gently sweeping up and down the length of her arm. “Where is this book now?”

       “It’s invaluable, and it’s too delicate to handle. I’ve put it in a hermetically sealed case, in the vault in my lab. I’m hoping, between us – Dr. Banner, Tony, and I – we’ll be able to find some way to preserve it so we can study it further. In the meantime, while I could, I made digital copies of the images, and the clearest section of text I could find. That way, we could analyse those through a global database for any kind of similarities for clues about when it was written, and who wrote it. I mean, even a date and language would help us now.”

       “It is very large?” he asks, curious. He can feel her nodding against his chest. “But in this case you’ve structured, could it be transported?”

       Jane looks up at him, craning her neck. “You want to take it to Asgard.” It’s not a question.

       He nods, elaborating. “We’ll be visiting soon enough, and I feel it wise if perhaps Odin Allfather looks into its pages. Your Midgardian legends forget that he is the god of poetry.” Jane shifts against him, plainly surprised.

       “Really?” Thor nods once. “I’ll need you to tell me who everyone is. Who’s the god of what. I don’t want to be an idiot when you introduce me.”

       “No soul would take you for a fool, my love. That role of court jester has long been my yoke.”

       “Wait,” says Jane, her voice just this side of gleeful. “Did that _thing_ with the dove and the guy who stole your hammer to marry Freyja, and you went in her place? In a wedding dress? And the smashed everything to smithereens?” She pokes him to emphasize her points. “Did that really happen?”

       Thor sighs heavily. _Of course that story made it to Midgard._ Jane starts to giggle.

       “Did it?” she asks insistently. At his silence, she exclaims, “Oh my God. Oh my god, it did! _You_ pretended to be someone else and then crashed your own wedding. Oh my God!” Her laughter comes easily now, and Thor retaliates by vising his arm around her, using his free hand to poke and tickle mercilessly at her sides. He doesn’t stop until she’s howling with laughter, wheezing and begging him to stop.

       “I’ll have you know I made a beautiful bride,” he says with pride and a good deal of indignation. Shortly, though, his face softens, and he pets her flushed cheek. “But you, my love… they will tell your story for centuries.”

       They lay tangled like that for a few moments more, until Jane yawns hugely behind a lazily raised hand. “All right,” she concedes at large, “bed.” She gives him a little shove and he lets her go, watching as she slips off of the bed and ducks around to the bathroom. Water runs for a moment, and he listens to the muffled sounds in a distracted kind of way. He sets the books and papers scattered over the bed down in a little towers on the floor, and asks Jarvis to dim the lights and lay a fire for the evening.

       “Of course, my lord Thor. Goodnight,” the AI replies pleasantly.

       Jane pads back into the room then, having traded away her jeans and sweater for one of his over-stretched undershirts. He’d noticed that several seemed to have disappeared when she’d left, and suddenly realises that, out of sentiment, she must have taken them with her. The thin fabric leaves his imagination spinning, the material ghosting over her figure in the pale light. Thor feels vaguely like he’s swallowed his tongue. She’s now in front of him, on his side of the bed, standing between his knees. She presses a chaste kiss to his lips, and then they work together to shed his own clothes until they are equally undressed. He spreads his hands over her back, pulls her forward, kissing up the length of her neck to find her mouth. Momentum carries them back into the pillows, and Jane belatedly recognises the hushed roar of the fireplace lighting. After a few long, patient kisses she pulls away, stifling another yawn despite her pounding heart. They settle into comfortable sleeping shapes – though Jane knows Thor will roll on top of her in his sleep, as always – side by side, and with his whispered breath over her ear and the heat of his chest behind her, she drops off quicker than she has in years.

       Her even breaths are a thin balm to Thor’s heart, thinking heavily as he is on the images in that ancient book, and what they could possibly mean. His own history he understands – Midgard has told its children legends of his life for a thousand years, he knows – but how the pictures of his mother and he as an infant were rendered… Nothing so personal or private had ever been displayed in the courts, nor would the Queen ever sit for such portraiture. The Queen who was the goddess women called to from childbed; her anger called mists far more oppressive than any storm Thor himself could muster. He had not lied to Jane when he said his father was the god of poetry – that was an absolute truth, and his careful words and harmonious tongue had leant Odin much charisma and popularity as a young king. But it was not his father he truly sought on this matter. Not for the first time since his boyhood – or even since his banishment – Thor fell into restless sleep wishing he could speak to his mother.

* * *

 

When Jane blinks her eyes open in the dim light, she wonders what it was that started her awake. Thor is still deeply asleep beside her, one heavy thigh predictably over hers, radiating warmth under their sheets. She can’t roll over from under the weight, but she’s comfortable enough on her back, Thor’s chest against her side. The low light from the fireplace on the far wall casts delicate, pleasing shadows over the high ceiling, but a nagging feeling simply won’t let her close her weary eyes. She has the distinct sensation of –

       “Observation lends itself to an indescribable itch, does it not?”

       In the dark, recessed behind the light of the fireplace, a voice taunts her. The shadows flicker and fall like a heavy vapour, revealing the long, lean lines of a man lounging on the couch. She wants to scream, wake Thor, throw on all the lights… but there is the warm, ridged press of fingers on her lips though there’s no hand in sight. She’s foggy from having just woken, but the pale face and dark hair suddenly click into place. _This is Loki,_ she thinks, _the sorcerer._ She’s never encountered magic before, but she realises that the press of this invisible hand is exactly that. He approaches slowly, stepping around a thick stack of scientific volumes beside a suitcase, and then looms over Jane’s side of the bed.

       He’s easily as tall as Thor, imposing in leather and amour, missing only the helmet and sceptre she’d seen in the papers. Jane can barely turn her head to watch him under the pressure – like an oppressive blanket; she’s unable to move at all. She watches as he settles into the chair buy the bedside, looking for all the world like he ought to be there, elbows resting carelessly on his knees. _No,_ Jane corrects herself. _This man does nothing carelessly, nothing without premeditation._

       “I congratulate you on both your arranged engagement and for distrusting me already. The wisest thing, of course, would have been to deny his oafish affections entirely,” he tilts his head in Thor’s direction, and Jane strains against the bonds that hold her so still, “but beggars cannot be choosers, and the men of your realm _are_ sorely lacking.”

       Thor remains still, and it frightens her even as his deep, even breaths continue. Her fear and frustration mount, and frustration wins out. Loki can see it all on her face, and he laughs. “Oh,” he says, but his grin is mirthless, “you are a ferocious little thing. Fighting against these bonds,” he sweeps a hand over her figure, “so stubbornly I can _feel_ it. Oh, you are a treat. All the mortals to yet cross my path have been nothing petty, base animals. Petty and tiny.” He casts a critical eye over her, and Jane focuses so tightly that her chest bows up, away from the mattress. Loki’s casual air crackles and changes, suddenly darker.       

       “My,” he says, “there may be hope for you yet, little thing.” His eyes gleam like he’s just told a riotous joke. “There it is, little thing; given your will and Thor’s heart, you’ll be my little sister yet.”

       Jane’s stomach roils at the moniker, and she stops physically fighting, instead pushing with her mind against the bonds just as she did before. She finds it just as exhausting. Her hand nearly comes away from the bed, and Loki snaps out of his carefully careless recline. “Enough!” Then, he pitches his voice softer. “Enough, Little Sister. I release you now, but do yourself a kindness and do not launch yourself at me. It will only harm you.”

       The invisible weight slides away from her like a tugged sheet and she shoves Thor’s leg off of her impatiently. His weight, welcomed moments ago, is now stifling in her desperation to be freely mobile. The weight of a hand still seals tightly over her lips, and she sits up, facing him expectantly.

       “Yes,” he sighs, like he’s the one being tormented. “One question at a time, and please, do not scream,” he says disdainfully. With her next muffled breath, the weight is gone.

       “Why is Thor still asleep?” she grits out, hands clutching at the sheets, balled tightly into fists.

       “A simple sleeping charm, Little Sister,” he explains, “just the same as used by the Queen all through our infancies.”

       “Are you a projection?”

       “Oh!” Loki smiles gleefully, and it looks wild for all that it does not touch his icy green eyes. “You are astute! And not even in your new city of York on that fateful day…” He looks like he might continue, but Jane interrupts.

       “Thor said your cell was warded against magic. How can you be projecting here? Is Asgard in danger?”

       “I said one at a time, Little Sister, but I favour your quick wit to Thor’s snoring. Be assured, I am properly bound and in chains, well-guarded and without the use of my magic. While much stronger than she, this eve I am merely a conduit for my lady mother.”

       “A magical positive-feedback loop?” Jane asks in a tone somewhere near _you’re kidding me, right._

       Loki hums, sounding just as bored with the situation.

       “Are you speaking her thoughts too, or only your own?”

       Loki holds up a single finger to gently pursed lips, silencing her question like she was a small, unruly child. “Would that you wake Thor – _gently –_ now? This question and others I will answer in his audience, lest the messages tumble from numb mortal lips.”

       She narrows her eyes at him, but does as he asks, running her fingers through his hair as she speaks at a regular volume. “Thor. Thor, you need to wake up.”

       The arm she’d flung off earlier reaches for her again, holding solidly across her hips. She’d sat upright as soon as Loki had released the bonds he’d placed on her, so her pelvis is even to his face on the bed. Thor nuzzles against her in his charmed sleep, trying to bury himself into her skin. Loki can see him shifting, but by some grace does not mock as his brother rouses from under the magic.

       “Thor,” she says, softer this time.

       He inhales deeply, chest rounding out like a barrel against her thigh. His eyes flutter, though still closed, and his lips find a thin strip of exposed skin at her hip. He presses a kiss against it, and then rumbles sleepily, “Jane.”

       Her voice is barely a whisper, scarcely more than a breath, and Loki strains to hear it. “Please, wake up.” The words themselves are not remarkable, but Loki has to wonder what Thor hears in them, because he rises faster than Loki has ever witnessed, eyes dark and face dangerous, no trace of sleep in his features. His thinks that if these fools have their way, she will be Asgard’s mouse queen: small, wide-eyed, and nearly silent.

       “Loki.” Thor’s voice is a low and threatening rumble, darker now than any time throughout that day in the Midgardian city of New York, and he almost mistakes it for thunder. _But no,_ he thinks, as lightening splits the sky in two with its telltale crack, _why imitate when the real will serve his beck and call._ The thunder that does come makes Loki repress childish shivers.

       “What are you doing here?”

       Outside, sudden winds howl furiously. Loki smirks, but the expression in his eyes is very different than the false emotions that play on his lips. Jane knows they call him a liesmith, and decides then that nothing from his mouth will ever be a truth. “Your… intended,” he drags over the word, letting it steep with disdain, “wields a sharper wit than your clumsy hammer. This is merely a projection. Strike not,” he says hastily, as Thor raises himself up to one knee, hand twitching at his side. “I am still in the dungeon beneath the river. This is our lady mother’s magic fleshed out with my own. My voice may be what you hear, but so does she, and this exercise is her willful endeavour alone. Previously, this was a feat I knew not how to accomplish, and while she was wise, her strength stayed with her people and failed at such distances. Mine, though in chains, does not, and we are a chimera of a beast before you.

       “She heard your silent cries for her comfort and council as only a mother can – and these, as I am instructed, are her words for you. ‘Thor, know you this – the heart of a mother will continue to battle long after the warrior has fallen.’” There Loki pauses, and all three take in the words for a moment. Then he adds, scathingly, “Tender thoughts, are they not? Mother to son is a vicious bond, one I’ve offered to free her from; just the same as I have tried to free you, Thor. But she clings to her prison, declaring the chains of motherhood much too strong to be flayed even by mine own silver tongue.”

       Thor’s face goes darker still, and the wind absolutely shrieks outside. Jane reaches discreetly, lacing the fingers of one hand with those Thor has vised unwittingly against her thigh. The thunder covers her next whisper, but the roar outside falls long and soft, rolling itself out. Lightening continues to fork the sky, but for whatever she said, the wind too has fallen.

       “So you lend your ear and conscious to Little Sister’s whispers,” Loki muses, because he cannot attack words he cannot hear. “I must honestly say, Jane,” and she scoffs at his idea of honesty, “I know not if to advise you to be _like_ or _unlike_ our mother. It is both fearsome and frustrating to be loved so.”

       “But why did she send you?” Jane asks, and then turns to Thor. “Did you call for her?”

       Thor rubs a hand gruffly over his face, and then says to Jane, “With not this intent,” at last. “The text you’ve found worries me the more I dwell upon it --”

       “You roused her from slumber in the middle of the night,” Loki interrupts, unsympathetic. “It is already well after dawn.”

       “Tell her,” Thor says, only to be interrupted again. Jane feels like it’s the being of a theme.

       “Tell Mother yourself. She hears your voices just as she hears mine.” He grins mercilessly when Jane stifles a squeak. _A mouse indeed,_ he thinks.

       “Mother,” Thor says, speaking like she’s at the foot of the bed rather than in a different dimension. Jane notices the change in the pitch of his voice, and tries not to dwell on it. “I would that you and Father advise me on this text my beloved has discovered. It worries us with its predictions alone, all the more that they cannot be read truly yet.”

       Loki’s voice is bored when he replies, obviously reciting a learned phrase. “The Lady Sif and Warrior Volstagg will travel by the Tesseract on the morrow at noon to retrieve you,” and then he levels a grin at Jane, “ _and you,_ Little Sister. The Queen is impatient to make your acquaintance.” Jane looks startled. Thor is thrilled.

       “Here at our tower balcony?” Thor asks. Loki nods.

       “Daybreak tomorrow, by this realm’s sun-cycle.” His face goes suspiciously blank for a moment, and while his voice remains impassive, his eyes become venomous. “Lady Jane,” he says, “Odin King and Allfather requests you deliver with you the text in question as well as your research on the Bifrost, and any other materials and sources you deem necessary. He wishes for your aid in the reconstruction process.”

       She’s shell-shocked, and blurts out a hasty, “Of course!” Loki continues. “And now that you’re speaking, Little Sister,” his eyes come back from distant focus to bore into her, “Frigga Queen and Allmother wishes you to know that your welcome carries no expiration. Dressmakers have been summoned, and you are not to worry over other small matters of the court.” She looks nervously to Thor for reassurance. He nods.

       “Thank you,” she says softly.

       Loki stands from the bedside chair, making his way back to the centre of the room. “Thor,” he calls out in farewell. “Little Sister.”

       “Brother,” Thor replies, weary with formality.

       “Loki,” Jane copies.

       His magic flickers once, twice, and then simply dissipates like steam. Thor leans back against the headboard, sighing heavily, and Jane goes into his open arms without hesitation.

       “‘Little Sister’?” he asks at length.

       Jane bites her lips before she replies. “He, uh… He woke me up first,” she says, “and we talked for a minute or two.”

       Thor runs a hand through her hair, stopping to cup the back of her neck. “Your tone tells me more than your words. He was unkind.” It’s not a question. Then, he asks with charge, “Did he harm you?”

       “No,” Jane says surely. “No. He made me nervous, and put you under a sleeping charm, but I think it was all posturing.” She then adds, a little sour, “He’s the God of Mischief, after all.”

       Thor lets out a chuckle, and then a yawn. He pulls the sheets back up around their bodies and holds her a little tighter. “Sleep now, my love,” he says. “Tomorrow will demand of us in our preparations, and dawn always comes quickly.”

       Jane hums in response, settling a few small kisses against his chest as she gets comfortable. “Wait,” she says suddenly. “How long will we be gone for?”

       Thor debates aloud before answering. “With the detail of Mother’s invitation, and Father’s request that you help with the Bifrost – I have extolled your cleverness to them more than once, my love – I would hazard to say several weeks, at the least.” Jane had expected as much, and she nods.

       “My life is insane,” she mumbled to herself. A chuckle rumbles through Thor’s chest, shaking her.

       “Even in the face of this vexing tome,” he says, “I have never known fiction to be wilder than the truth.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello readers! Just a heads up on how things are progressing; I've been writing this by hand, and then doing initial rounds of editing and then finally typing and editing again. I don't have a beta, and so I really appreciate your patience and understanding over any textual errors. It's likely, however, that this will undergo a major overhaul once the whole thing is done, to tidy up plotholes and foreshadow more effectively. Please, please let me know what you enjoy and don't enjoy. I have just shy of half written, and I've also constructed two perfectly plausible epilogues. The biggest difference is the major character death, so it's been tagged for from the get-go, but depending on how things play out, it may not happen.
> 
> My work and school schedule are going to be insane over the next few weeks, as I'm actually still working and studying and not taking a holiday break. I appreciate your patience! Now that the first few chapters are up, by the end of the month I hope to be in the routine of posting one or two chapters a week. I'm planning (praying) to have the hand-written draft done by Valentine's Day (ballpark word count: 160,000) but that's at my Nanowrimo pace, so we'll just see if I have the steam to keep that up for three months.
> 
> To clarify, the major relationships here are Jane/Thor and Darcy/Steve. Other couples - Pepperony and Team Delta - are mostly in the background. I've nodded to them early on so we know where they are, but that's going to be the extent of it. I'd rather play with the team dynamics overall: how Clint and Darcy get along, how Natasha and Phil play with others, and how Pepper and Bruce are coping in their little circle as "Tony Stark's Collection of Reasonable People."
> 
> IMPORTANT: This is a long-term, long-course fic, so that means kids, pregnancies, and a miscarriage. From here, those things are still many chapters away. If anyone has concerns or triggers, you can find me at fartherfaster.tumblr.com. Drop me a fanmail/ask, and if needs be, I'll try to accommodate for that in the relevant chapters' construction.
> 
> Finally, focus on this story will start to shift between the team on Earth and the characters in Asgard after this chapter. I'm mostly looking at Lady Sif and TW3, and then Loki and Frigga's relationship. Loki doesn't get out of the house much these days. If you have questions about Thor: The Dark World and how this fic deals with those events, head over to my tumblr askbox and we can talk about it there. When the time comes, I dig pretty deep into Norse mythology. I've skirted most of Marvel (I'm really not that familiar with the MCU) and have rather taken enormous creative liberties with the real myths. To the purists, an apology. I do at least try to be consistent and reasonable in my adaptation (which is more than we can sometimes say for Marvel, cough cough.)


	5. It's A Jungle Out There

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After Sunday dinner comes Monday's breakfast. Darcy and Steve have a sleepover; Clint recognises the faults in gender-stereotyping; Jane presents her findings over Bruce's homemade waffles; Natasha reads Dostoyevsky, predictably in Russian.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is a completely blind reference to an original character from Darcy's past. The character herself is inconsequential - her mere mention is to highlight how little we know about Darcy's life before she interned for Dr. Foster.
> 
> One thousand thanks to Sarah.

       Steve tugs Darcy away from the kitchen in a moment when everyone else is still engaged – or, at least, when Tony isn’t paying any attention. His fingers are warm on her wrist, and she follows him out into the corridor, and then into the elevator, with no questions. His shoulders are tense, and there is a telltale stress-wrinkle in his brow that generally precedes moral-high-ground lecturing. She’s a babysitter – it pays to read their expressions like books. “What’s wrong, Cap?” she asks, once they’re stepped out to his floor.

       “Nope,” he says. “You don’t get to play that card right now. What’s wrong with you, Darce?”

       She bites back her instinctual snark – Steve is prone to explaining himself when met with silence. He leads her into the living room of his apartment, with its huge leather couches and heavy wooden accents. They settle into opposite corners of the longer couch. Darcy pulls her legs up under herself, keeping her silence.

       “You’re tense,” he elaborates like she expected, “and you’re doing that thing where you try to make yourself smaller.” He hunches his massive shoulders to mimic her. “And now you’re biting your lip, which means I’m right. So, come on, Darcy. What’s eating at you?”

       “Research trips aren’t supposed to end early.” Her voice is tense when she finally replies.

       “So, you’re worried about Jane?” Steve asks, feeling a little encouraged that she’s willing to talk to him.

       “I’m worried about all of us,” she snaps back. She hadn’t meant to sound so sharp, but she’s not going to apologise for it. “Think of it like this,” she says, “for Jane, research is just like recon is for you; when is coming back from recon – early and unannounced – ever a good thing?”

       Steve considers it. She really does have a point. Still, he wants to hear how bad Darcy thinks it could really turn out. “Has something like this ever happened before?” he asks.

       Darcy snorts. “The last time a research trip was interrupted,” she explains, “it was because Thor fell from the sky and Jane ran him over with a truck.”

       “Oh.”

       “Yeah,” Darcy nods at him. “So I’ve got a feeling that whatever this is, it’s seriously bad news bears.”

       Steve looks at her askance. She huffs, literally throwing her hands into the air. “Go get your laptop, Rogers. Cosmic disaster or not, I _know_ you haven’t seen ‘Sister Act’.”

       Rather than argue, he goes to his room, fetching his Starktech computer and what he knows is an HDMI cord… whatever that is. “Sister what?” he yells.

       “Whoopi Goldberg and Professor McGonagall are nuns. In New York. In the 1980s. You’ll love it, and I’m not letting Captain America back out onto the streets of this city until he knows what he’s fighting for.”

       “Hey!” he protests, putting the computer in her lap and crossing his arms over his chest. “That’s not fair. Honour and truth and patriotism… American values. I know what I’m fighting for!” Darcy queues up the film and then sets the laptop down on the coffee table, connecting the cord to the huge TV on the far wall. When she stands up, she shoos Steve back to the couch and disappears into the kitchen.

       “Don’t skip the ads!” she yells.

       “But it’s for Kotex,” he calls back plaintively.

       “Ha!”

       Really, Darcy’s got a point. Advertisements are one of the most noticeable differences in life from Now versus Then. She comes back just as the last ad closes – this one for next year’s Ford – bearing a huge bowl of sweet and salty popcorn and a smaller bowl of Maltesers. She’s not fond of them, but they’re his favourite candy, after black shoelace licorice. He doesn’t really know how Darcy figured it that out, but he chooses not to question her methods. She ends up being spot on – the movie is a riot. That she ends up curled into his chest, his arm over her shoulders holding her close as they both let out belly laughs is just a happy coincidence. He rubs her shoulder when she mumbles _I’m so not going to cry this time_ followed shortly by a snuffle and _dammit._

       The movie comes to a close, and they sit through the end titles until the screen is black and the room is dark again.

       “I don’t want the world to end tomorrow,” Darcy complains. “I really, really don’t.”

       He puts a hand on the back of her head, tilting her face up to his so he can see her eyes in the dim light. “You really think it’s going to be that bad?”

       She nods, and then says, “Earth doesn’t have a great history with visiting Norse deities,” but her tone is missing its bluster and sounds strangely empty. Steve suddenly remembers that for all Darcy’s brass, she lost close friends in the attack. It was months ago, and she never breathes a word of it – no one else around here does, either. Even though they were involved, the Avengers were pretty detached from the whole thing. Steve thinks that only makes it worse. Even though the movie is long over, she’s still tucked up tightly against his side.

       “Hey, Steve?”

       “Yeah, Darce?” he replies immediately. Darcy is always either sunshine or snark, and her darkened mood has Steve unsettled, simply because he’s never seen it before. He finds himself wishing he could take on whatever burden it is that’s wrapped around her shoulders.

       “Can we have a sleepover? I just… I’ve got such a sinking feeling that tomorrow is going to be a total shitstorm, and I mean these apartments are great and all but I just really don’t want to be alone right now.” She looks at his face before he can school his features, and she sidetracks and backpedals so fast he can barely catch up to where she’s going. “I’m sorry, that’s a really weird thing to ask out of the blue and you can totally forget it, just call it a night. I’m sorry.” And this time she makes to stand up, and wait a second – is she crying? “I’ll go, you’ve had enough pop culture to overdose for the night, I mean, runaway nuns teaching golden-hearted delinquents how to sing? As if --”

       “Darcy.”

       Steve has a firm hold circled around her wrist, and as she’s been talking she’s been absently tugging, completely oblivious to the contact, only aware that her feet aren’t making any headway.

       “Darcy. It’s alright. You can stay.” He tugs gently once on her wrist, and she folds back against his body. Her shoulders are stiff under his hand, but he catches the telltale rattling breaths. He gives her a few moments’ silence to compose herself, and shortly she mumbles something against his chest, but it’s completely lost to him.

       “What’s that?” he asks gently.

       “Stupid movie,” she enunciates excessively, but she doesn’t raise her head.

       “…Why?” he asks, dumbly. They’d been laughing like goons the whole way through.

       “Erica wanted to be a music teacher.”

       Steve doesn’t really have words for that. “Darce…” he starts.

       “I know!” she exclaims, sitting up. “I know I need to put it behind me. And I have, really, I swear. It’s just once in a while there’s this stupid little thing and it’ll remind me of her,” she takes a hiccoughing breath, “and it all falls down all over again. And now I’ve got all of you guys to worry about and there’s so much bad stuff going on and I get that I can’t hang it up on any of you – you, or Clint, or Tasha,” and Steve realises that Darcy and Barton seem to be the only ones with the right to use that nickname, “and stupid Tony in his stupid suit thinking he’s fucking invincible. And I mean, Jane’s got a deity-sized golden freaking retriever for a boyfriend, but you’re all…” she takes another gulping breath, and this time leans in closer to his chest, wrapping her arms around his neck. “You’re all so human. And you’re all stupid enough to pretend you’re not or that it doesn’t matter, and I’m stupid enough to go get attached to all of you. Shit.” The last word comes out on a breath of a laugh, watery and tired.

       He’s churning over everything she’s said, not letting himself think too hard about lost friends. Before he can untangle himself into a decent response, Darcy yawns, stifling it behind one hand. He nudges her off his shoulder. “Hang tight,” he says, slipping quietly off to the master bedroom. He comes back after only a moment, carrying a duvet and a spare quilt, bopping her lightly with one pillow, just to see if he can bring her smile back. She snags it, pulling it into her lap. When she looks up at him, he passes her a clean t-shirt to sleep in – he knows her well enough that if he were to send her up to her floor to change, she might just manage to talk herself out of coming back downstairs. He tilts his head to one side. “Go change,” he says softly. “I’ll put on some Disney, okay?”

       Darcy takes hold of the hand he extends, and he pulls her to her feet, and then into one more hug. “Jungle Book?”

       “The Jungle Book,” he promises.

       When she comes back from the bathroom, still in her stockings but free of everything else but his – frankly huge – t-shirt, he’s got the screen paused to the first few opening seconds, and he’s pulled out the king-sized mattress from the middle of the couch. The other couch has one lonely pillow on it, mostly out of a misplaced sense of decency, but both blankets are spread out already, and as Darcy crawls under the covers, she doubts either of them is going to say anything about the arrangement. She chides herself. _You’re a responsible adult. Calm your tits._

       They curl up comfortably with more popcorn and candy than they ought to, Darcy unapologetically sings along to the songs, and Steve hums in tune. It’s far later than either of them would normally stay up, what with supervillains being such early risers, so they’re both nearly asleep when the credits finally roll. They shuffle and shift awkwardly for a moment, but Darcy catches his wrist and mumbles, “If you don’t want to sleep here, it’s okay, but it’s okay if you stay, too.” And with that, he draws her in closer, her head against his chest. He runs a hand slowly up and down her back, and Steve thinks absently about how nice it is to have someone with him.

       “Jarvis,” he says softly, “turn off the television, please?”

       It clicks off with a small zap. “Goodnight, Captain. Ms. Lewis.”

       “Night, Jarvis.”

       Steve is a furnace and Darcy is a koala and they end up kicking all the blankets off during the course of the night. She is, surprisingly, the first one awake, and she brings in mugs of tea for both of them as Steve blinks awake, eyes feeling gritty. They trade shy smiles over the rims of their mugs, and Darcy tells him a sincere thank you.

       He makes to dismiss her, say it’s nothing, what friends are for, but she repeats herself. “Really, I mean it. And don’t say it was nothing, because it wasn’t ‘nothing’ to me.”

       “Okay,” he accepts.

       She gently knocks her shoulder against his, and he knocks back. “I’m going to shower,” she says, standing from the hide-a-bed. “I’ll see you in the kitchen for breakfast?”

       “Monday morning,” he agrees, unsure of what’s best to say at a time like this.

       “Waffles with a side of world domination,” she chirps back, and Steve really wouldn’t have pegged her for a morning person.

* * *

 

       “No way.”

       Darcy cringes and halts in her tracks.

       “No freaking way,” Clint repeats. He’s sweaty and flushed, obviously just coming up from the lower gym and its track. He’s looking at her like one of them is deranged. She’s also keenly aware that she didn’t bother to get changed before she left, and that Steve’s borrowed shirt, while comfortable, is loose and very thin and she is not wearing a bra. _Of all people to catch me in the stairwell._ _At least he’s not Tony_ , she thinks glumly. She crosses her arms over her chest and glares threateningly at Clint. He practically hoots. “Sleepover?” He challenges.

       “The Jungle Book,” Darcy asserts firmly, “and Sister Act, and _nothing_ else.”

       “Whatever you say, Hot Sauce,” Clint replies, clearly not believing a word she says.

       “Seriously, Clint -”

       “Uh-huh,” he agrees amicably. “Showers,” he points back and forth between the both of them, “and then I want all the details at breakfast. With coffee.”

       “You’re an adult man and the worst gossip I know.”

       “Hey,” he says, breezing past her, “don’t gender-stereotype. It’s bad for you.”

* * *

 

       Darcy showers quickly, and she thinks Tony Stark’s state-of-the-art bathrooms really need award placards on the walls. The steam billows thick around her, but she only allows herself fifteen minutes of self-indulgence. Having already seen Clint, and knowing that Steve is awake – she steadfastly not think about how she blinked awake last night to feel his warm hand against her back, having slid under the loose shirt he’d lent her – she knows Bruce’s famous breakfasts will be long gone by the time she gets up there if she dallies any longer. She hauls herself into a pair of dark jeans, a loose tank, cardigan, and scarf while her hair is still practically dripping; then she heads out of her apartment in a flurry, bounding down the hallway and up the stairs just to combat her own nervous, impatient energy.

       Upon entering the kitchen, Darcy realises three things in quick succession: Clint takes just as long as she does in the shower, because they’d walked down opposite sides of the same hallway in perfect time, reaching the door in tandem; Natasha has been awake for too long, judging by the way Bruce is jealously eyeing her teapot; and Tony looks like the dead have risen, pitifully holding his coffeemaker but not actually getting anywhere. She steps up quietly behind him, wary of the way he flinches at the lights. Then again, it might simply be his natural reaction.

       “If you let me have a cup, I’ll make your coffee.”

       His response doesn’t come out in any known human language, but Darcy takes his weak hand-waving and shuffle towards the table to be an acceptance of her offer. As he sits himself down, there is the sudden, hot sizzle of bacon, and everyone in the room sighs happily as if on cue. Well, save for Natasha, who quirks an eyebrow, the only change in her otherwise stony face. Darcy thinks she might as well have sung Hallelujah. One of the coffeemakers starts to percolate loudly, and after a moment Darcy generously gives Tony the first cup. After the first sip, he looks like he’s thinking about naming the next tower after her.

       She takes her place at Bruce’s side, manning the bacon so he can set to work on the pancake batter. Thor may be the tower’s resident God of Thunder, but Dr. Banner is the in-house King of Breakfast. The pancakes are huge, perfectly round golden circles, and Darcy helps set out ingredients and beat eggs because when everyone’s in attendance – and everyone is always in attendance, Steve and Pepper come through the doorway one after another – the group literally goes through dozens of them.

       She sets the smaller warming oven to low, makes her own batch of famously cheesy scrambled eggs, and takes them and the first platter of bacon to the table. Clint and Steve descend upon it, and Natasha elbows and snarks at her partner until she can nick items right off his plate. Pepper pours herself a cup of whatever floral tea Bruce has decided upon this morning, and sits herself down on Tony’s other side. She is already impeccably dressed. Tony slides a box of sugar-free granola towards her with one finger and a surly look – like he doesn’t even want to touch the box, it puts him off so much – and once she’s poured herself a bowl she discreetly picks little bits from what Tony’s collected on his plate. The sounds of eating and cooking fill the room, its most ambitious talkers not yet up to functional levels of caffeine. Darcy slides back to her feet after a moment, eager to sneak the first available pancake. _Forget the super-spies,_ she thinks, _these are the real covert operations_. She manages to snag it before Bruce can turn a displeased eye on her, and she loiters casually until the first dozen are ready to take to the table.

       “So, Darce,” Clint starts, and by now Tony’s had enough time and coffee to look gleeful at his tone of voice, “what were you doing -”

       “Jane!” Pepper interrupts, and Darcy feels like she could kiss the other woman’s shoes. They’re towering black Manolo Blahniks with chrome heels. She reconsiders, thinking she might just kiss them anyway. She takes another sip of coffee, restrains herself, and then jumps onto the proffered distraction instead.

       “Thank Thor you’re back,” she cries dramatically, opening her arms to her friend, though she remains seated across from Steve, beside Natasha.

       “It was not my doing,” the giant announces. He’s taken up Darcy’s forgotten space at the counter, stealing a bacon slice even as it sizzles in his hand. When he makes for a second piece, Bruce swats his hand away impatiently. Thwarted, he instead holds out Jane’s chair as she sits, and she in turn stacks an absolutely huge plate of pancakes for him. By this time, Clint and Natasha have set their plates aside, content to watch the rest of breakfast unfold. Darcy has been subtly trying – and failing – to gauge Natasha this morning; Clint has obviously told her that he caught her in the stairwell leaving Steve’s. She feels like she’s had the Black Widow staring her down all the while she’s been here, but whenever she looks, Natasha’s eyes are nowhere near her. Captain Rogers hasn’t been paying the slightest bit of attention to Barton and Romanoff’s antics, and he picks up the conversation smoothly.

       “Since the big guy didn’t get you stateside early, what did?”

       Mission details are strictly confidential to the actual practicing Avengers – and as far as secret keepers go, they’re spectacular.  The resulting conversation at the kitchen table naturally goes from bickering to sports to science at a wild flurry of a pace. Now, however, the tight, intense glance exchanged by Jane and Thor, who are two of the group’s most talkative members, is surprising, and everyone at the table notices. The room momentarily holds its breath. Bruce, taking in the nervous tension of Jane’s shoulders – she’d once called him her brainiac-in-arms – goes stock-still at the stove. Darcy groans, letting her head fall into her palms, her plate forgotten. “Oh, no.”

       There’s sarcasm in her tone, but Steve notes that more importantly it lacks last night’s panic. “It’s the end of the world as we know it,” she declares. “Again.”

       “Not so, my fair Darcy,” Thor consoles her, though it’s both obviously intended for the room at large, and his tone is sorely without any kind of real certainty. Bruce only comes back to life when he sees Tony take a calm sip from his black-as-pitch coffee.

       “We were looking at the sky,” Jane says helpfully, and Clint’s face clearly says _you’re a fucking astrophysicist._ Natasha isn’t even looking at him, but she has the good sense to elbow him in the ribs anyway. “But we found something bigger on the ground. It’s… Well, it’s a game-changer.”

       Pepper pales. She does not like that phrase. She can tell Thor is itching to speak just from his too-still silence. Only the finger flexing against his thigh, resisting the urge to call his hammer, break his motionlessness. That he’s giving Jane the floor to speak uninterrupted is telling in itself.

       “With global warming, the polar ice caps are melting, and ancient sub-glaciers are shifting and melting, too. The shelf we were stationed on has retracted by nearly a mile in the last ten years; nearly a third of that loss was in this last summer thaw alone. With the ice leaving, there’s new ground being exposed.”

       Tony is the first to interrupt, as expected. “But these glaciers have been in place for thousands of --” but he is in turn interrupted.

       “I was in ice.”

       “ _Aesir_ live for thousands of years.”

       Tony closes his jaw with a snap, looking back and forth between Bruce and Steve. “Both good points,” he concedes, tone insouciant.

       “We found a building,” Jane says, “a pagan holy site of some kind. But it’s way, way older than anything recorded in that region.”

       “Does it predate the Trondheim Cathedral?” Natasha asks abruptly. It’s the first she’s spoken to the whole group.

       “We haven’t finished dating the masonry itself,” she replies, “but the cutting styles and the evidence of what technology was used in its construction matches the _oldest_ remaining stonework at Trondheim, which dates it to 1100, and we think the carvings are older. Nidaros is recognisable. This has _never_ been seen before.”

       After a moment of silence, Thor finally speaks. “Except…” he prompts Jane.

       “Except that we found something else more important than the building. Something we do recognise, from inside the… the chapel, I guess.” She pulls two tablets out from the shoulder bag over the back of her chair, passing them around. She had previously set them to display a slideshow of images. Tony snaps up a passing tablet, touches it to his Starkphone, and then says sharply, “Jarvis, show and tell.”

       The room darkens immediately and Tony flings his hands outwards, using Jarvis’ holographic software to create suspended, translucent screens before the group. He flicks his wrist until an image solely composed of text is in front of him. He streaks his index finger over a long section of the text, and then demands, “What am I looking at, Jay? Can you get us a translation?”

       “This language is previously unrecorded, sir,” the AI responds, “and there are no resources as such. My closest estimation --” Clint is the first to notice a small bubble with a progress bar rapidly completing before quickly blinking out “—is that this is perhaps Ancient Norse runes written phonetically for the first time. If so, the two languages share linguistic traits at forty-one percent consistency. A proto-lingual root of Old Norse, perhaps.”

       The first images of the building are quickly passed by – Jane doesn’t bother to explain their astrological significance right now. Everyone looks curiously at the first few paintings of mother and child, but recognition doesn’t come until two boys, looking like they’re nearly teenagers, come into view, running side by side with exhilaration on their faces. One boy is dark-haired, in black and green, lanky and slim. His golden companion is only slightly taller but nearly twice as broad, wearing gold-accented armour over blood-red leather.

       “Oh my God,” Bruce breathes.

       Natasha is the one to snag the image, gesturing with her fingertips until it dwarfs the others. “It’s you.” Her voice has no inflection, but the statement stands firm.

       “Aye,” Thor agrees, rueful and nostalgic. “My brother and I as youths.”

       Before he can continue, Tony asks a blunt question. “Okay, but how old were you, really?” Everyone knows Thor is ancient and had simply elected to not talk about it and it _bugs_ him. It honestly doesn’t matter to the group and Tony knows he’s just being an asshole.

       Darcy sees what Tony’s doing, and she wants to call him on it. _Besides,_ she thinks, _until Thor gets angry he’s a bearded Golden Retriever. Maybe he ages in dog years, too._

       “The Mountain Guard of Alfheim reported a dragon’s nest scant days away from the city’s walls. Odin King decided were we old enough to accompany him in dispatching the beast. I was not yet of the age of adulthood; Loki was less than one thousand.” Darcy looks at Jane’s face carefully in the glow of the hologram, but her features are unreadable.

       Bruce looks at Thor and asks, “And how old are you, now?” From anyone else – in any other tone of voice – the question might have felt intrusive or tactless. Thor is kind enough to ignore that.

       “Much older,” he sighs. His body shifts over slightly, and Darcy suspects it’s to bump his knee against Jane’s. It’s done casually enough, but the roll of Jane’s shoulder doesn’t hide her searching hand. _For all their differences,_ she thinks, _they really kind of need each other to fill in the gaps._

       Natasha has minimized the image, and flicks it away impatiently. She pulls up a series of new pictures for the group. In each is Thor, generally accompanied. He mentions the names that Darcy remembers: Sif and Fandral and Volstagg and Hogun – who doesn’t look so grim in his picture but rather pensive.

       “So you’ve found a book detailing Thor’s life,” Steve says after looking at all the presented images. “But there are hundreds of books on Norse mythology. Yes, it’s the first time you’ve found it and it’s the first one in this language, but why are we treating it like it’s knocked us out of the park?”

       “It predates the Poetic Edda,” Natasha answers. Pepper turns to her in a silent question. “I did some research before… and after Manhattan,” she details dismissively. “The Poetic Edda details the lives and genealogies of almost all the gods, goddesses, villains… Between it and the Prose Edda, they’re the bottom line on Norse history. Though they clearly got some things wrong.” She pauses, and then looks at Thor carefully. “Who was Baldr, if he wasn’t your half-brother?”

       “Baldr, son of Tyr?” Thor asks, voice somewhere caught between startled and affronted. “A cousin, though not one I call gladly. Like his father, he was a fool and a gambler, often betting things that were not his to lose.”

       “But Loki, and the mistletoe?”

       Thor is confounded. “Would that I know how badly our histories were recorded here. Baldr made dangerous threats against our lady mother, the Queen, while we were still only boys. Loki Silvertongue was the only one who could talk a weakness out of our drunken uncle. He was allergic,” Thor finishes simply, nicking an abandoned piece of bacon from an unattended plate.

       The images are still up, and the room is cast in eerie blue light even though the sun streams behind the blinds with November’s frosty glare. Jane continues to speak. “The thing is that it doesn’t only detail Thor’s life,” she says quietly. She takes a breath, and then flicks her finger over her own personal phone, sending up a new picture. Darcy’s the first to recognise it.

       “Shit.”

       Tony reaches out, tugging at the corners until it expands hugely. The table is silent until he mutters under his breath. “Jesus.”

       “Jane,” Bruce says carefully, having wiped and replaced his glasses on his nose. “Jane, that’s you.” _Putting your Ph.Ds. to good use, I see,_ he comments to himself.

       There’s a solid ten seconds of silence as everyone takes in the implications presented before them, by which point Darcy has adopted a mantra of “Holy shit. Holy actual shit. Jesus.” Steve places a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Crap,” she says more loudly.

       Jane cuts her off there. “There’s close to another three dozen images that I’m in alone. I didn’t look too carefully at any of the others,” she says. “They were a little too surreal. Anyway, I’d rather not show them. You could say that they’re chronologically way ahead of where we are now and for all that I’m a scientist, I don’t want to tempt the gods.” Clint snorts.

       “I know. But more important is that we don’t make judgements until we know what we’re dealing with. And we won’t know that until we can read it.”

       “And just how will you do that?” Tony asks. “You’ve got the most intelligent processor at your literal fingertips, and he says the language doesn’t exist outside of a handful of grammatical coincidences with Ancient Norse.”

       “There is no eye on Midgard that may decipher it, Man of Iron. That is true.” The sinking feeling slams back into Darcy’s gut. “We will travel to Asgard tomorrow at dawn to present this tome to the Odin King and the realm’s greatest scholars.”

       “How does Asgard even know it exists?” Clint asks sharply. “Your Rainbow Bridge is broken still.” Thor and Jane exchange another look.

       “There are other means of travel,” Thor says expansively. “That and besides, the repair work comes quickly. Asgard is a kingdom many millions of years old. It has been destroyed before, and others will attempt it yet.” Jane is studiously not looking at him. Bruce calls them on it.

       “You haven’t answered the question.”

       “As gods,” he explains reluctantly, “we have means of communication unfamiliar to Midgard. Your technology has created men without bodies,” he waves a hand at the ceiling and everyone understands that he’s about Jarvis, “and you, Stark, have played the role of a god and created bodies without men inside them. You have invisible threads that connect all the corners of your world together – devices that transport your voices. And this!” he gestures emphatically to the hologram before them. “Before you protest my magic,” he says, “remember your own.

       “Upon Jane’s telling of this text, I was wrought with questions. As I have since my youth, I prayed to my goddess mother for guidance. Unlike ever before, where she may have found me days or weeks later to guide me for give counsel, the yester eve she sent a projection of herself to us. It had not been my intention,” now he looks apologetically at Jane, “but such is motherhood.”

       He’s met by a table of dark and pensive faces, though Steve is sincerely sympathetic. Noting the tension, he says, “Most of us… you don’t really end up in this business if you came from a happy home.” He makes to continue, but Tony interrupts.

       “So mommy dearest picked up the Asgardian bananaphone,” he says sarcastically, “and told you, what? Playtime was over? You’ve got a curfew?”

       Thor doesn’t understand the details of the references, but the insubordinate tone and what he know are slights against the Queen – intentionally over his head – makes his heart pound with a fury. Jarvis’ screens flicker momentarily with electrical interference. Natasha feels the hair on her arms rise into goose-bumps.

       “You will hold your tongue with care, Man of Iron,” Thor replies, voice so low and deep that Darcy feels it in between her ribs, “lest it be not yours to hold.”

       Darcy is honestly frightened of Thor for the first time since New Mexico, but what bothers her most is that Jane is looking at Tony with the same kind of startled anger in her eyes. She tries to dispel the tension. “Okay, okay, guys! Breathing is a good thing. Jane!” she raises her voice fractionally to get the other woman’s attention. “What did Thor’s mom actually say?”

       Jane shakes herself out of her raincloud. “The travel arrangements are already in place. Otherwise…” she and Thor share _another_ one of those looks that Darcy’s more habituated to seeing passed between Pepper and Coulson, and she knows they’re not getting the whole story. “I speak science, Darce, not Shakespeare.”

       Clint frowns.

       Thor raises his eyes away from the level stare he’d been holding belligerently on Tony. “Who is this Shakespeare I hear of so? Is he another of your scholars? A scientist?” he looks to Jane. “His is a name you mention, but a voice I hear not.”

       The table shifts uncomfortably, but Pepper saves the day. “He was a very, very famous scholar. Millions of people are familiar with his work. He just had a… particular way of speaking. Highly distinguished,” she praises. The answer satisfies Thor enough.

       Tony has had enough of his own silence, and drags his hands through the air, gathering all the holographic screens and suspended images until they disappear into nothing. Jarvis cues the lights in the kitchen back up without being asked. “How long will you be in orbit?”

       “Your riddles grow tiring,” Thor replies, but his tone is not threatening like earlier and instead is almost fond. “I wonder if they cause you as many grievances as my brother’s silver tongue brings him.”

       Pepper says, “Yes,” at the same time Tony says an adamant “No!”

       Thor laughs freely, and Jane gives him the lovesick smile that Darcy’s used to seeing. She watches as she discreetly catches Bruce’s attention.

       “Dr. Banner?” she says, and he looks to her with surprise on his face. “I was wondering… would you take a look at some of the transport cases I’ve sketched out? They’ve asked that I help with the Bifrost --”

       “Hey! I want to help!”

       Jane looks at Tony with impatience. “You literally insulted the queen of the universe. You don’t get to play, Tony.”

       Clint snorts. Natasha elbows him in the ribs just for good measure. 

* * *

 

       She’s surprised when Thor finds her in the library, curled up on one massive, creaking leather couch with Dostoyevsky in Russian; she’s a purist. He appears in the doorway with little preamble, but does not yet enter her space.

       “If I may have your ear, Lady Natasha, I have come to seek your counsel.”

       She puts her book down, pages held open against her thigh. She nods to the spot on the other end of the couch. He hesitates for a fraction of a second, and she thinks he would be much more formal and imposing if only he could stop fidgeting. “Alright, big guy,” she says, but Thor only looks uncomfortably at his hands when she speaks.

       “Hey,” she softens her voice, poking his leg with her toes. His face turns to hers quickly, and Natasha is struck with the thought that he really isn’t human. The blue of his eyes is nearly electric, only differing from what she saw in Clint’s because where his had been icy, Thor’s lend a hope and warmth. “I have a _very_ specific skill set, Thor,” she reminds him, though not unkindly. “I don’t really see how you need them.” _Well,_ she thinks, _whispering. He really needs to work on that._

       “Your skills are many and invaluable,” he says quickly. It’s the kind of honest assessments he gives the team members, never with any ulterior motive. “But I seek you for your knowledge of culture,” he nods to the book in her lap.

_Russian literature?_  “Dostoyevsky?” she asks drily.

       Thor laughs, shaking his head. “As I have always suspected, Lady Natasha, your sharpest blade is the one you wield from behind your lips.”

       “Thank you,” she says, genuinely pleased with the compliment.

       “Do not thank me yet,” he replies, “for I have to ask that you bear this conversation to no one but us.”

       She doesn’t scoff because he sounds so serious, but she does raise an eyebrow at the suggestion of keeping things private. He reads her look for what it is.

       “You bear too many of your own secrets, my friend,” he says, and Natasha almost hears an apology in his voice. “It is not kind to ask you to take on my own.”

       “Thor,” she says, closing her book with finality and turning to face him. “There’s a difference between keeping dangerous secrets and helping a friend in confidence.” She looks at him hard for a moment. “What is it about Earth that you need to know?”

       He doesn’t look the least surprised that she’s cut to the chase so quickly. “It is in regard to Jane,” he says, as if she hadn’t already put that much of the situation together. “I wish to know of Midgardian marriage rites.”

       “Okay,” she responds immediately; digesting the information can happen later. Then, a thought strikes her quickly. “Why aren’t you talking to Darcy instead? She’s much closer to Jane than I am.”

       Thor smiles softly. “I had thought of her. But should the Lady Darcy and I share any trait, we would both have the subtlety of a thunderstorm.”

       Natasha does not beam at the joke, but it’s a close call. “Yeah,” she agrees softly. Then, to business, “Does Jane already know you want to propose?”

       He nods. “We have already made our vows to one another,” he explains, “and though I said we could be married here, she insists Midgardian law and your religions would make it impossible. I am certain, however, that the rites of Aesir royalty will be far and foreign to what she knows.” He pauses, and then looks to Natasha. “I have not yet told her of the challenges we may face. I can only hope my father sees not a mortal but rather the woman who made me wise. The woman who makes me fit to be king. I may only ask it of him,” he says, and then smiles. “I feel it may be my queen mother who wields that blade of persuasion on the matter. At least, I so hope.”

       “Well,” Natasha sighs, considering, “I can’t help with those things, but at least in the Judeo-Christian religions – what Jane’s from,” she adds, “a couple of modern things are pretty consistent.” He nods encouragingly. “Brides wear white dresses,” she starts to suggest, and Thor breathes a laugh, cutting her off. He does have the decency to look sheepish, though, when he meets her eyes.

       “You got that from us,” he says simply. He looks a little like the lunacy of the situation has finally settled onto his shoulders for the long haul. She raises one eyebrow, and it suggests vaguely violent intentions. He holds his hands up in surrender.

       “What about jewellery?” she asks after a moment. Thor shakes his head, and she continues. “Here, the groom proposes with an engagement ring, and then at the wedding ceremony both exchange plain wedding bands.” She holds out her own hand to explain. “You wear your rings on your left ring finger.”

       Thor shakes his head again. “That is unfamiliar to me. Perhaps our southern counterparts gave you this practice.”

       The comment distracts Natasha, and she wonders for a moment about recruiting Hercules to the team, eventually deciding that Hades and Delilah might make the deal more trouble than it’s worth. “Well,” she says once she’s back in the present, “I’m sure she might appreciate the gesture. It’s a little like a universal sign of being married on Earth.”

       “And what do they look like?”

       “Generally, the engagement ring is set with diamonds. Wedding bands are plain. But they can be anything, really.” Natasha hesitates. “Actually, in your case, I might suggest something heirloom.” The word, in this context, is foreign to him.

       “Something that once belonged to your mother, or grandmother, especially if it was given by a husband. They have more history, of course, and they kind of suggest that the family approves. Considering that your family is so involved in the whole process anyway, it might…” She trails away for a moment, and then says, “If your mother is as invested in this as you think she is, she might appreciate it, too.” She nods, mostly to herself. “Find her a ring. Out of all the small things, it’s the most important. After all,” she adds a little distantly, “marriage is what you put into it, right?”

       Thor nods thoughtfully, and they sit in silence for a just a few moments before he turns to her. “I thank you for your counsel and your friendship, Lady Natasha,” he says with some finality.  “While I may say so in confidence, I bid thee a farewell. You remind me uncannily of another dear friend and warrior, the Lady Sif.” He stands, smiling at her openly. “Would I that you meet, too. She is our goddess of war,” he adds. “I see companionship between you.”

       She smiles softly in return. She’d read the legends, but knew that where fiction had cast them in the light of lovers, reality had them as the closest of friends. “Well,” she teases, “you could invite us to the wedding.”

       Thor’s smile falters. “Be there a wedding at all,” he mutters darkly. Natasha suddenly sees things more clearly.

       “Wait a minute,” she interrupts as he stands from the couch. “You want to give her something like a ring, or an Earth wedding… you want to give her something just in case this comes crashing down, don’t you?”

       His face sets into hard lines, but in the time it takes him to turn back to face her, there is a kind of kindness in his eyes. He steps towards her, taking one hand gently, slowly, and then shaping it into the grip shared by warriors. She copies his hold carefully. “Your skills are invaluable,” he tells her again, “and I am glad and proud to have fought by your side.” He squeezes his hand around her wrist for just an instant before letting her go with a nod. He turns, walking steadily away and out of the room without a backward glance.

       Natasha realises then that no one has gotten the pair to answer just when exactly they’re coming back.

 

 


	6. Chicken Little

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Darcy makes literary references, and Jarvis is the sum of all the reasonable people that Tony's ever loved.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One thousand thanks to Sarah.

Darcy manages to snag Jane by waiting for her outside the lab she shares with Bruce. They’ve been leaning over boxes and duffel bags, packing in meter readers, files as thick as Darcy’s head, and what she once heard Tony call his ‘homemade spectrophotometer’. At first she wondered why they wouldn’t just head to Oz with a Starkpad and a memory stick, but then she remembered that they use magic, not electricity. Darcy’s halfway to thinking about pulling the fire alarm, but decides that Brucie hulking out would not further her agenda in the slightest. Instead, she ducks down one level to the common kitchen, making Jane a cup of tar-black coffee and a funny-smelling, hard-to-pronounce tea for her companion. Steaming mugs in hand, she heads back up to the lab ten minutes later. Rather than being so soundly ignored, Jane looks up through the glass wall. Darcy raises the mugs in an enthusiastic ‘come and get ‘em’ gesture, but she’s careful enough that none of the scalding liquids slosh over the brims. The scientists abandon their work without even a glance between them. _Brainiacs and caffeine make for happy couple,_ she thinks, watching as they both rush out of the lab.

            “Thank you, Darcy,” Bruce says appreciatively, breathing in the steam from his mug before he sips it cautiously. She smiles back at him. Jane only makes greedy hands before snatching her own mug, practically inhaling its contents, all the while looking at Darcy over her rim suspiciously.

            “What do you want?”

            Bruce looks taken aback by Jane’s blunt question, and he glances askance between the two women. Darcy grabs Jane’s elbow before she can disappear again. “I need you,” she whines plaintively.

            “For?”

            “I need to talk about stuff.”

            “You ‘talk about stuff’ with Barton.”

            Bruce is carefully tiptoeing away from the conversation. Darcy’s face doesn’t change.

            “What stuff?” Jane repeats, unimpressed.

            “You know,” Darcy hisses, “ _things._ ” Jane still looks uninterested. Darcy plays her trump card.

            “I might have slept with Captain America.”

            Halfway down the hall, Bruce chokes on his tea.

            “Oh my God,” Jane breathes. “You need to talk about _stuff._ ” The pair of them race past Bruce, arm in arm, but now Jane is the one initiating.

            “I said ‘things!’” Darcy shrieks, barely keeping up. The door to the stairwell closes with an echoing slam, and the gust it creates blows past a shell-shocked Bruce, ruffling his hair in the sudden silence.

* * *

 

            Jane practically throws Darcy headfirst into the apartment, her questions coming out like bullet points – though they mostly consist of ‘Seriously?’ and ‘Why aren’t you talking?’ and the occasional ‘I was only gone for eight days!’

            Darcy, however, isn’t paying her any attention; hesitant to discuss something like this when Thor might walk in.  The tower residents still don’t talk about what happened last time. “Where’s puppy Godzilla?” she demands, craning her head around the kitchen even as Jane holds her shoulders, corralling her to the table with the occasional shake.

            “Doing god-things and meditating,” she says dismissively, not caring in the least if that’s the truth. “And I have stuff and things, too, by the way, but oh my God, you go first.”

            Darcy holds her hands up in surrender. “I meant sleeping-sleeping. Like, snoring-sleeping,” and she wags her index finger through the air, drawing an imaginary line of ‘zzz’s above her head. Jane lets her head fall into her hands against the tabletop.

            “Thank God!”

            “Hey!” Darcy protests. “What’s that supposed to mean? Also, I’m telling you about the sleeping—sleeping because not-sleeping is suddenly on the radar. And it would definitely happen while you’re gone! And that’s a weird thing to tell Clint, isn’t it? It is. By the way,” Darcy finally inhales, “how was talking to his mom? I mean, talk about batshit things that happen to you. You should write a book. Actually, no, I’ll write the book. Do I need your permission for using your likeness, or can I call it a biography?”

            Jane is completely tuned out, rather focusing on her coffee like it’s the only thing tethering her to the physical world. _Scientists,_ Darcy thinks dangerously. _You never know._

            “Forget all this, Jane, and whatever you’re working on with Green Tea. You need to take coffee with you if you’re supposed to be remotely functional.” Darcy laughs at her own joke, but sobers quickly. “Jane?”

            She’s been hearing, but not listening, and is aware that Darcy might not yet be out of steam. She makes an inarticulate noise into her hands.

            “Are you okay with this? Like you seriously want to go and get even more involved in the Dead Snow Scrolls?”

            “The _what?_ ”

            “You know,” she waves a dismissive in the space between them, “like the Dead Sea Scrolls, but you found these in the freaking North Pole.” She stops herself short. “You said there were more pictures,” she accuses. Jane holds up defensive hands. “Don’t tell me you turn into Mrs. Claus. Don’t do that to me!”

            Jane wonders, not for the first time, what would happen if she ran over _Darcy_ with the truck. Thor turned out all right. She doesn’t really know how to get Darcy back on track, and settles on weakly saying, “It’s not the North Pole.”

            “Dude,” Darcy argues, “don’t give me that shit. And while we’re talking, I do see the whole fairytale, soulmate-to-the-god-on-Earth thing. I get it, and I like you happy.” Jane looks skeptical, but at least she’s actively listening. “But now you’re giving Houston the bird and leaving the whole ‘Earth’ part of the equation behind.” Darcy’s had her fill of sentimental and sappy, and she knows that Jane totally wouldn’t put up with it coming from her. “And,” she says with some authority, “the last time you got involved in something like this, Tony Stark’s barbeque came to life, and then Manhattan went ‘Chicken Little.’ You don’t have good luck with Norway.”

            Jane looks like she’s not quite on the same page. She might not even be in the right volume. “Chicken…?”

            “‘The sky is falling,’” Darcy deadpans.

            “Darce,” Jane says, but her head just sort of tilts and her mouth goes a little slack and she just doesn’t really know how to respond to that. She doesn’t so much want to keep secrets, but the whole thing is so big and wild and strange that she can’t really find the right words. They sit in mutual silence for a little bit longer.

            “Just… Are you going for the science of it?” Darcy asks hopefully. “Or did your thunder bunny decide to drag Ph.D. Barbie home with him? Don’t get me wrong; he’s great, I love him too,” she argues when Jane looks at her hotly, “but he’s also an alien god who likes to hit things.”

            “We’ve been talking about going anyway,” Jane says, “because he’s heir to seven other worlds, not just Earth and Asgard, and he can’t spend all his time here, and if we’re going… If I’m gonna… Well, it should, I should, we -”

            Darcy’s eyes have grown comically wide. “Oh my God,” she announces. “I fell asleep on Captain Icicle, but you’re actually going to be an intergalactic princess.”

            “I didn’t say that.”

            “Yeah,” Darcy agrees, “you’re trying really hard not to. Asgard isn’t just science. You’re meeting the parents.”

_The problem,_ Jane thinks, _is that she’s not wrong._ “You really don’t turn down an invitation from the Queen,” she huffs.

            “Jesus,” Darcy breathes. “Your life is insane.”

            “I know,” Jane mumbles against her empty mug. Darcy glances up at the clock on the microwave. It’s already after two in the afternoon, and Jane is leaving in less than twenty-four hours, and she has no misconceptions that she’s coming back any time soon, though neither she nor Thor have actually said as much. She stands up suddenly from the table, going to the freezer.

            “What are you…?” Jane demands half-heartedly.

            Darcy reappears from her digging with the bucket of Heavenly Hash she was looking for, glasses slightly foggy. “You don’t have long left on this Earth,” she starts dramatically; before realising she doesn’t know how that quote ends. “Before you go up, up, and away to play Hermione to your Viktor Krum,” she says, “so choose: Wii Wheel of Fortune or Real Housewives?”

            “Darcy -”

            “Don’t,” she replies with finality. “You can finish getting all your stuff ready after dinner; it’s not like you’ll be sleeping tonight.” She’s not sure where the sentiment came from – they’d been firmly in the ‘scientist and intern’ bracket of their relationship ever since they met – at least, until she was hired by Pepper. Now, however, she felt obligated to ensure that Jane’s last night on Earth wasn’t one exclusively of worry and science.

            “I’d like to buy a vowel,” Jane replies eventually, after rinsing out her mug a little excessively in the kitchen sink. “And Asgard is so not Hogwarts just because it’s magic.” She stops, considering. “And Loki is not Voldemort.”

            “He’s certainly not Snape,” Darcy mumbles, sour. “Fine; the Simba to your Nala? Don’t tell me that isn’t some solid imagery.  And the banishment!” she declares. She doesn’t say ‘luscious flowing man-mane’ and gives herself some credit.

            “We didn’t meet as children,” Jane counters.

            Darcy sighs as they make their way from the kitchen. “So long as you’re not Romeo and Juliet, because that was a fucking disaster.”

            “Darcy.”

            “Hmm?” she hums, swiping her key at the elevator door to go down to her floor.

            “We’ll be fine,” Jane says. “We’ll all be fine.”

            “Sure, Pinocchio.”

* * *

 

            By the time he’s finished his drink, Bruce has paced the length and breadth of his balcony enough that he’s almost a little dizzy watching his feet. Unconsciously, he ends up back inside his apartment, elbows on the kitchen counter, thumbs idly tracing over the ridges on the mug. It’s enormous, square, and unmistakably his – it’s the Tardis mug Natasha gave him last Christmas. He’d loved the show as a kid, and it had almost become a refuge when he was a student in college. Even young his ideas and research proposals had startled his professors and peers. His greatest remedial trait was how seamlessly he fit into a ragtag group of misfits who ordered the older series from the library, sitting around waiting for the Big Finish audiobooks, and regularly quipped back and forth that failed experiments were the sole fault of whoever had forgotten to reverse the polarity of the neutron flow. In fact, thinking on it now, his early days in college are the closest comparison he has to the madness that is Avengers’ Tower. That he’s comparing a band of sometimes-functional superheroes, scientists, and Darcy Lewis to twenty-something physics grad students doesn’t escape him, but this is the life he leads now. He and Jane had made a good deal of progress in what she’d decided to take to Asgard – the resources that would best help her own notes, and a few other texts on the subject of architectural math. Thor had repeatedly insisted that she’d have the help of anyone on the reconstruction team, but he and Jane had shared a look – if she was going to be any help, she would have to know the math, not the magic.

            They’d successfully drawn up a durable transport case for what the text was currently housed in. She’d described it to him as huge, leather-bound, with pages not unlike onion skin. Bruce wondered how she’d even managed to flip through it in Norway without it turning into pulp. Jane had caught his look, and explained that sections of the book were frozen open.

            Now that he’s thinking, he knows the text is in its own hermetically-sealed case, but something about the whole ordeal doesn’t sit well in his gut. He rinses out his mug once more, and then grabs battered notebook and heads up to Tony’s private R&D levels. For all that Jane had put Tony in time-out, Bruce has grown comfortable and somewhat reliant on the other scientist; it’s more often than not that they are each other’s sounding boards. Just as he reaches the door to his apartment, he belatedly calls out to Jarvis. “Hey, Jay?”

            “Yes, Dr. Banner?”

            “Where’s Tony?”

            “Sir is on the fifth floor of his private shop, Dr. Banner. Shall I tell him to expect you?”

            “Please.”

* * *

 

_Deep Purple_ is pounding over the workshop’s sound system, and Jarvis overrides the music player momentarily.

            “Jarvis, I will recalibrate you!” Tony emptily threatens as the guitar riff fades through his welding mask. Rather than raise the mask, he continues to yell through it. “I will complicate your algorithms! I’ll make you female! I’ll make _Bing!_ your default search engine!”

            “Doing such would be a risk to your own well-being, Sir, and so I must advise against it. Doctor Banner is seeking your audience and will arrive shortly.”

            “Gloating?” Tony complains, “Because he gets to play with Jane’s magic box?” He makes a disgruntled face at his own comment. “I didn’t say that.”

            “Say what, Sir?”

            “You know,” Tony mutters through the mask, “sometimes I like it when you sass, but sometimes I don’t. Can’t you make yourself an algorithm for that?”

            Jarvis only replies with resignation. “Nor does Captain Rogers always appreciate yours, sir.”

            “The Cap’s geriatric,” Tony summarises. “We’ll get him a walker for his birthday; hey, that’s July fourth, right? That’s gotta be July fourth.”

            “No, sir,” Jarvis says. Tony’s face screws up into a scowl under the welding mask – he’s pretty sure Jarvis got that tone of voice from Rhodey. The AI lets out a sound that could loosely be called clearing his throat, if he had one. “Doctor Banner to see you, sir,” he introduces politely, just as Bruce steps in through the smoothly sliding door.

            “No…” Tony mumbles to himself, plucking off his welding gloves, one finger at a time, and then discarding his mask. Bruce looks at him thoughtfully, familiar with these one-sided revelations. Tony is staring at the space Bruce occupies, but his eyes are nowhere near focused on his friend. He bides his time, using a handkerchief from one pocket to polish his glasses before he slides them back on his nose. He crosses his arms over his chest, props one hip against the workbench, and settles in to wait.

            Tony finally seems to snap back to reality, his eyes finding Bruce’s and seeing him for the first time.

            “‘No,’ what?” Bruce asks.

            “Pepper, not Rhodey,” is all Tony says, without offering any kind of further explanation.

            Bruce fights a laugh. Tony narrows his eyes at him, like they might have been in cahoots. Then with another sigh, he collects the protective gear, passing it and the torch to Dummy. “Put them where I’ll find them,” he says, as the bot starts to roll away. “Just not on the – _fuck_ , Dummy!” Tony rushes over to the workbench, slipping and tripping between the projects in various stages of completion. He waves his hands wildly at the bot, cursing a blue streak. “Not on Pepper’s fucking papers, you shit-for-brains!” he screeches, arms wind-milling as he slips on a slick of oil. They’re things she needed him to sign a week ago, and once she’d left, he promptly ignored. It was his hard-wired response to ‘tasks assigned to self by others.’

            After some fierce whispers that leave Dummy looking like a kicked puppy, Tony walks back towards Bruce with considerably improved grace, having put the items away satisfactorily with his own two hands. “Are you gonna let me play with Jane’s magic box?”

            Bruce’s eyebrows climb.

            Tony’s mouth twitches in a way that vaguely reminds him of a rabbit. “I know,” he says by way of concession, settling on a stool near the workbench. Something catches his eye, and he pulls from the mess a bag of chocolate-covered acai berries. “Candy?” he apologises.

            Bruce plucks a few from the bag without question, and then tosses his battered notebook onto the workbench. It throws the blueprints, schematics, nibs of chalk, and odd bits of circuitry into greater disarray. He pulls his phone from his pocket, and flings the file up to Jarvis’ holographic screens with no warning. The AI reacts accordingly, and the room darkens instantly, leaving the two men lit by an eerie shade of blue.

            Tony pulls and plucks at little parts of the plan, bringing certain pieces forward so he can manipulate them in his hands. The box itself isn’t all that special, outside of the fact that it’s meant to be a space-proof casing for what Jane’s planning to store in it. He plucks a sensor-tipped stylus from his pants pocket, and starts writing against the hologram in a messy scrawl. The white letters and equations stand out clearly – and Bruce has had enough practice reading Stark’s chicken-scratch, even backwards – that he realises Tony is only tinkering with their numbers. Doctor Banner grabs a similar pen from the workbench and tags along Tony’s shorthand so that Jane has a cat’s chance of deciphering it, should she choose. Finally, Tony clears his throat, pinning Bruce with a sharp gaze he’s not expecting.

            “Now that we’re done with that farce,” he says with an edge, “are you going to tell me what’s actually bothering you? Or do I have to reinvent the toaster while you do dark and pensive?”

            Bruce realises with belated clarity that Tony’s done nothing more to the blueprints than back-check the most finicky parts of the equations, giving him only the illusion of privacy from scrutiny. Well, and he added a Stark Industries logo. But it’s small, and Bruce pretends not to notice.

            “I just have…” he fades off. “You know that Darcy’s convinced the world is ending?”

            Tony nods once. “I caught her mumbling Chicken Little in the elevator.”

            Bruce sighs. “Don’t you think it’s too convenient?”

            “I’m a scientist,” Tony says shortly. “I don’t deal in hunches or feelings, but I’ll play; ‘easy’ and ‘good’ are not happy bedfellows.” Both men regard one another carefully through the translucent hologram for a moment, and then Bruce speaks quickly, all in a rush.

            “How likely is it that Jane really is the first person to find this thing? Seriously, frozen in ice?”

            Tony cuts him off just as quickly, tone apprehensive. “You think she’s lying?”

            “I think it was put there for her.”

            Realisation crawls across Tony’s features.

            “She could handle and document certain pages because they were _frozen open_. And by all rights, the thing should have been mouldy pulp by the time it got here.”

            Tony looks blankly at the designs between them, twisting the perspective idly with distracted fingers. “If it’s from the eleventh century and she’s been handling it, she should be bubonic Betty by now.”

            “Exactly,” Bruce punctuates softly. “But she’s fine – we’re all fine.”

            “For how much longer?”

            “And is it really a good thing that it’s going to Asgard? I mean, the _king_ has asked for it, so it’s not like we can keep it here -”

            “- with no idea what it even says -”

            “- can they magic against it?”

            “Fucking magic,” Tony sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Magic and gods and I bet the Valkyries are real, too. I was such a good atheist,” he complains.

            “Space Vikings,” Bruce notes drily.

            “I know,” Tony says, morosely taking another handful of chocolate. “For what it’s worth, I hope this doesn’t become another cosmic smackdown,” he says. “We got enough flak for the first one.”

            “Right,” Bruce agrees sarcastically, “because the supervillains wouldn’t love to have you guys roasted right out of the sky.”

            Tony looks back at him sharply. “Bruce,” he says plainly, “you’re one of us. Not just the Other Guy. You.”

            “Yeah.” Bruce sighs, gently taking his glasses away from his face. Tony impatiently draws the holographic image down to nothing, leaving them standing in the dark lab space. “I know.”

            “Then act like it.” Tony turns away sharply, and barks at Jarvis, “Let there be light!” He hefts a huge sheet of metal, unpolished and slightly scuffed and nearly as wide as his wingspan, out from an open crate on one side of the shop. Once it’s completely free, he yells, “You! I need two masks, another pair of welding gloves – the good ones – and a torch. Dummy, don’t touch anything.” As he passes around the shop, he smacks one elbow against a wall-mounted pane of glass. The construction plans flicker into existence.

            “Foster may be an astrophysicist Viking-princess,” he announces to Bruce ostensibly, because no one else is listening, “but I’m a mechanic. Blueprints are my shit.” He throws a blowtorch at Bruce without looking, and the other scientist catches it with practiced reflexes and a put-upon sigh. “Come play,” Tony whines pathetically. “I promise I’ll share.”

            They settle into their work – Jane had given Bruce, and by arguable extension, Tony – free-rein over the actual construction. That said, the woman’s brain is an absolute beehive of the theoretical, and they require only minute adjustments to the plans. Between them and the bots, the case comes along easily enough. Tony had been planning to use that particular sheet of metal for the internal structure of a new suit, something that was able to withstand the vacuum of space and still provide a reliable breathing apparatus. His head had been such a mess of hypothetical enhancements and potential fallout that he’s grateful to have something substantial to occupy his hands with. Within minutes, the unsatisfied howling that comes from just below his heart is quiet. It’s not gone, and it’s louder when he holds his breath, but then when Bruce – just like Pepper, just like Rhodey – catches his eye, giving him half a smile, the muscles in his chest unclench. The fear that pumps through him endlessly pauses, yawning, like a bored panther. It’s much easier to breathe when his hands and his mind are busy, so he stays focused in the moment, not thinking about new suits or new, frightening boundaries and certainly, certainly, not thinking about the sky falling in.

* * *

 

            The Mariana Trench is both the most deadly and most alive part of the world’s oceans. The black, murky water holds a hundred thousand secrets. Where the tectonic plates are weak and magma roils under its dark, icy shell, a thin blanket of activity swarms. Black smokers, from the size of cartoon chimneys to proper volcanoes, spew out super-heated gases. The salt water boils away on contact, leaving the hot rock layered in organic sulphuric oxides. Absolutely alien forms of life populate the area – mostly bacteria – but even giant squid, pursued by sperm whales, can come nearly this deep. There are creatures humans have yet to discover, too: cannibalistic sea stars; arachnoid crabs; and prawns that scuttle, huge in the dark. Evolution is still in the process of eliminating their sightless eyes, and they are milky white, swollen and pendulous, hanging limply on equally useless eyestalks. Bioluminescence does no good for blind predators, but their prey come instinctually closer. Ribbon worms, electrified by ion cross-currents through osmotic exchange, are paper-thin and completely malleable, save for the hard jaw and the ring of razor-like teeth. Beyond the creatures that can be seen, science has another hundred unique species of bacteria yet to be identified; another dozen live in the magma of Earth’s mantle itself.  Human technology will never find them, though, the great granddaughters of the first life this planet ever fostered, and so the mystery continues.

            But the bacteria aren’t alone. Something alien even to them shares that sunken Hell, burning and shrieking and writhing just under the skin of the Earth. The tectonic crust is being stretched apart, and there is an ancient giant under that seam, desperately working for a moment of relief. Small cracks abound, and the icy water seals them like clotted cuts. With every passing day, the twisting grows more violent, the scars left taking that much longer to heal.


	7. Sight and Sound

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loki, Frigga, and the very first flagstones of this fiction's mythology.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Readers, thank you for your patience and your kindness. Sarah, thank you one hundred times.

 

            Loki comes back to his own body twisting and writhing piteously in his chains as his conscious thoughts catch up with him. He wants to moan out the discomfort of crawling back into his battered skin, but such a luxury is not his. His lips are bound, sewn closed by the Allfather’s own hand. While his projection spoke, so must his lips have moved – the silver stitches are raw and bloody. Frigga watches him attentively, waiting for the long lines of his body to loosen before she moves into his space. She traces the new scars around his mouth with her fingertips – they smell clean, of balsam and cedar and more faintly of roses. Her touch is delicate, and the balm and its matching enchantment take away the worst of the damage and easily half of the pain. She watches the expression on his face change from childhood sickbed to adolescent wariness. He is trying for the arrogance of his adulthood, but she can tell by the lost light in his eyes that his poisoned chains have burned like acid through even his stony composure. That she has always known this day was coming does not ease her sad wonder at where the beautiful, dark boy of his childhood disappeared to.

            Loki arches a brow at her sharply. _You won’t do me the honour of seeing me as a man in chains; rather you look on a mewling babe?_

            “Loki,” she admonishes softly, “your mother sees with more than just her eyes.”

            _The heart sees no clearer,_ he counters. He will not admit it, but even to share thoughts like these is a relief. With Thor away to Midgard and Odin King deep in Odinsleep, it was suggested by the King’s Council that until one of them returned perhaps it was best to keep Loki’s magic warded a little more closely. Frigga, as much as she loved her son, did not trust him. She felt the weight of the throne heavily for all that she upheld its duties well – and she knew from experience that if she had to sway favour from the council, it was best to choose her battles with care.

            The telepathy they share – first established in his infancy if the stories are to be believed – gives him some respite from hearing nothing but the cacophony of his own thoughts. They are both skilled enough that only what they want to share comes to the forefront, and in any case, Frigga responds aloud to his thoughts. She does not push, but she can feel the threads in his mind, writhing and angry like a sack of snakes and just as venomous. At the moment, she is closed to him, and he takes in the white knuckles of her hand and the hard set of her mouth.

            _What troubles you so, Mother?_

            She looks away from him to the damp, shining back stone walls. They are well out of reach, slick in the light of the white-flame torches. They are magic, giving light and no heat at all. Loki is its centre, shackled in only leather trousers to a table of two rough-hewn pieces of timbre. They are crossed like an X, and he is positioned low enough that he can lean his head back into the brace of the two arms without straining his neck greatly. This, he thinks, is an obvious fault. In a cell designed for the worst of the palace’s royal criminals, Loki is almost comically small, a boy in the place of men. In his armour he is just as formidable, but stripped down, he measures almost too small on a device fit to hold someone of Thor’s breadth, or perhaps Volstagg’s great girth.

            The table he is chained to is built at an angle, his head pitched just slightly higher than his feet. It makes three-quarters of the room visible to him, if only a small portion of the stinking, wet floor. In all, the cell itself he finds mostly lacking. The only things they’ve done right are binding him in cursed chains and sewing his mouth closed. The cell itself, he decides, is just for show.

            On the other side of the wall, there is a heavy, slick sliding sound, not unlike leather on wet stones. It carries a great impression of weight, though, and while the floor trembles, the river that contains the cell - for it is suspended in the frigid water - sloshes and heaves against the outside.

            _The snake is a nice touch,_ Loki thinks drily towards his mother’s silence. She turns to face him sharply.

            “Is it true?” she asks, something like shock in her words. “Have you seen a likeness?”

            Loki makes a noise low in his throat without moving his lips. _They call it Haettulillgandr. Little Monster. From where else are they going to find such a beast?_

            “It may not…” Frigga trails off.

            _No?_ Loki thinks viciously, _I haven’t seen my son in millennia, but surely the Allfather could commission some brave fool to find his progeny. And then wouldn’t the irony be sweet?_

            “Jörmungandr and Fenrir are beasts, Loki, like their mother. A wild thing cannot be tamed.” Despite her words, her voice is soft, and Loki takes some peace in her tone even while he curses his heart for the soft sentiment.

            _And Hela?_ He demands, because now the thought of his children makes him sick. Mountain Giant and Aesir were not unheard of, were in fact the unions that brought forth the very beasts of legend that carried weight and moral values in storytelling – Hugin and Munin among them, not to mention Sleipnir.  _What of her wildness? She was just a girl!_

            He heaves a great breath, pulling at his stitches, and a single errant tear falls from one eye. Frigga wipes it away, but her soft tone has turned stern. “She was complete wildness inside a girl’s shell,” she says, “and you know this. Her green eye saw lies and her black eye saw truths while she herself saw nothing at all. She remains as wild as her brothers. Loki, she sits on the throne of Hel, and she is safe there. Dead men do not have any more lies to tell.”

            This is surely why the snake was used to guard Loki’s cell. Even if it was not his grandson, whoever had decided it knew the snake’s presence would torment Loki with the thoughts of his own banished children.

            Hela was made Hel’s queen as just a child – for having the shape of a girl she was as tame as a flock of startled starlings. One eye saw absolute truth, the other saw all falsehoods, and never could she blink, lest she forget which was which. By the time she could speak she was absolutely insane. The Giantess was dead, and Loki, still unstable from all that time isolated with her and their brood, had not needed to beg that she at least be treated like the girl-child she was in his eyes. So the palace dressed her in finery, and she was placed before her grandfather astride Sleipnir, and the trio raced for nine straight days on the branches of Yggdrasil to make it to Hel, the underworld and realm of the inglorious dead. Odin placed her on the throne and declared her queen, whispering soothingly that the dead men had already lived all their lies and all their truths, so she need not worry herself over them. Then, he climbed back onto his destrier – another grandchild, the irony – and raced back to Asgard. The arrangement had never been spoken of since.

            Frigga spared thoughts for the other two, Fenrir bound by his ribbon in the mountains of Nidavellir, the realm of the dwarves who crafted that binding strand of silk. Jörmungandr was said to be the World Serpent, roiling in the oceans of Midgard, but she privately thought he’d been killed – at least, until this Haettulillgandr had come forward. _Little Monster indeed,_ she thought darkly.

            “Come,” she demands, smoothing her skirts and standing quickly. Loki fights to keep the surprise off his face, and rather gestures with black humour at his bindings.

_But of course,_ he replies, and Frigga can hear the sliding, exasperated tone he usually reserves for his brother’s companions. She ignores it, laying her palms over the width of one shackle and whispering under her breath. The spell is nothing special, he knows, but the remaining shackles still manage to muffle the sounds that reach his ears – if he were to try to read her lips, his vision would waver, thick and distorted like a heat wave. Someone was thorough when they smithed his chains. He can, however, watch the links themselves, and under her touch they become like sand, heavy and sharp like pewter dust. It collects thickly on the wet floor, reforming as if melted into ugly, formless hunks.

            She works around him quickly, stepping back just a fraction when her work is finished. Loki wonders if she came here with such a scheme as this, for where are the guards now that he is unbound? What is wise Heimdall seeing in his golden eyes? He swings his bare feet down to the floor, his legs seizing and cramping, but he refuses to all disobedience from his muscles. His mother says nothing as she watches him.

            Doubtlessly, she wants to reach out, giving him her hand… like she must have when he learned to walk; like when he delivered spells too strong for his childish body and they knocked him backwards; like when they found him in that cave with Angrboða’s body, deliriously clutching an infant daughter while a snake wound heavy on his shoulders and a wolf pup crouched low by his side, equally fearful and ferocious.  He doesn’t give her the thought, but he suddenly wonders if the woman who made herself his mother has always stood just out of arms’ reach, waiting patiently for whatever cue to extend a hand and help him back to his feet. Has she really been there for so many centuries, and always with the same acceptance and patience? _How very different you and Father are,_ he thinks a little louder, focused as she is now on the cell’s wall, etching a doorway into the stone by sheer magical will.

            She places her hands against the stone, about to shove. He can see the shallow scratch outlining an archway just large enough for them to pass through. She turns to look back at him. “Eleven centuries,” she corrects him, and Loki’s already-pale face blanches, realising she must have heard it all. She reaches out gently, taking on of his battered wrists in her hand. This time there is no spoken spell, rather her innate healing that soothes the bruises from his shackles, blooming in shades of blue and lavender on his marble skin; small with dark centres, they make him think of forget-me-nots. When he looks to her eyes, she manages to convey happiness and sadness simultaneously. “And you know that I will wait twice as long again.”

            She turns to face the stone wall again, searching out the last snags in the rock. Loki tries to guard his thoughts more closely, wandering as they are. “Hold your breath,” she warns, giving the wall a mighty shove. It crashes backward as the River rushes inward in a crashing wall of icy water – but he finds that where it should soak them, they remain dry, even submerged as they are. Just as the water comes in over their heads, Frigga yells over the roar, “Now you can breathe. Stay close!”

            She steps forward against the current, and Loki watches as her skirts swirl and twist. Though there should be nothing under his feet, it is solid enough, and he follows just a single pace behind her.

            The cold that does not touch his skin grips fiercely at his heart when he makes out a pair of glowing amber eyes. Loki had not noticed, but Frigga carries one of the white flame torches and it burns viciously bright. In its light, Haettulillgandr approaches them, hissing hatefully. The snake is black, glossy armoured scales shining with green tones, patterned in metallic gold diamonds. Jörmungandr as his father is easy to believe – the World Serpent had been ringed in black, green, and gold when Loki first held him. The amber eyes tug hardest on his memory.

            Frigga raises an empty hand, and Loki can hear the sleeping charm as she sings to the snake. It wavers, head weaving, and with a final, soft hiss, collapses heavily. Loki anticipates the impact of it striking the pathway Frigga has laid for them, but instead the beast tumbles down into the black depths of the river. Once it is out of sight, Frigga continues walking, looking back to make sure Loki is keeping pace behind her.

            He stays by her side still, and is slightly surprised as their floor starts to slope upward. Soon, he can see the orange, heated glow of real fire through the water. They are finally breaching the river, its surface still and black, their exit not creating the smallest disturbance. A pair of startled guards, armoured in all shades of gold, watch their appearance with apprehension. Were they not seasoned swords of the King’s Guard, they might have shifted under Loki’s menacing glare.

            “My Queen?” and then Loki realises there is a third guard, higher on the staircase and out of his low line of sight - though he does not need his eyes to identify this warrior. The voice is respectful and formal, but the voice alone gives them away, for it is distinctly female. Sif stands, outfitted in her standard armour, though she has forgone both her helm and shield in favour of her broadsword, sheathed at her hip, and her double-bladed longsword, strapped across her back.

            “Go,” the Queen directs to the other two guards. That they do so in such a hurry leaves Sif with a barely withheld scoff. She then directs her attention to the shield maiden. “Accompany me, Lady Sif,” she says, and Loki notices that her eyes have yet to find him, as if she can stubbornly will him out of existence. “My son and king will return before noon of the morrow; my son and prisoner has whiled enough time under the River of Ghosts.” Frigga continues mounting the steps until she is even with Sif, who stares unwaveringly forward. “I seek to return him to his previous cell, nothing more.”

            Loki follows the Queen, watching as Sif’s mouth twitches discreetly. Knowing her since their childhood, his recognises that she is likely biting down fiercely on her tongue, knuckles white on her broadsword under her gloves. As he passes her, she turns, bringing up the rear of their small march. Her boots are heavy, and he can hear the quiet slap of his own bare feet, but his mother before them makes not a sound as she navigates the paths of the dark dungeon.

            All three stop when they finally make to the end of the longest corridor, where Loki’s designated cell is. Sif stays a respectful distance, should the Queen wish to impart some personal words. Frigga lays her hands against the warded glass, and the fine runes that cover it flash into bright existence, responding to her touch. This cell was built exclusively for royal prisoners – though those who commit less heinous crimes then to deserve the cell at the bottom of the River of Ghosts – and it will only open to the words from the mouth of royal blood.

            Loki wonders, briefly, if in their childish adventures, had Thor convinced him to try to open this cell - would it even have listened to the spell as it tumbled from his Jötunn lips?

            The runes solidify, sparkling gold in a way that reminds him of birdcages and lantern frames and perhaps charcoal braziers burning in his mother’s chambers. It dematerialises, folding away into nothing, and he follows the Queen inside. The swamped, overwhelming feeling like the cursed chains comes back to him, panicky bile rises in his throat and he breathes tightly through the sensation. For all this cell’s delicacy and refinement, it is just as intensely warded as the cold stone chamber so far below them.

            The Queen sits lightly down on one of the green and gold settees that furnish the room. “We cannot taunt ourselves with what we might have known in the past,” she tell him, “and no,” she adds with a tired note in her voice, “we do not use the colours to mock you.”

            The throne must truly be wearing on her. Loki hadn’t even had the thought himself yet, but as he settles into one green velvet high-back chair with a dark expression, he realises he was getting there.

            “I have been watching your face for a thousand years,” she reminds him gently, “and you are not always the closed book you would so like to be.”

            Loki peaks his long fingers under his chin and scowls at her.

            Frigga sees his expression and continues anyway. “Your brother returns on the morrow, and will doubtlessly seek to commune with you. Do you accept?”

            Loki nods once after some hesitation.

            “Then I shall see you on the morrow, my love,” and she passes back through the golden cage with a final, soft swish.

* * *

 

            Just as her husband may storm down the corridors of the palace with a certain menacing stride and remain unimpeded by those who wish to beg his ear, so too does the Queen have such a recognisable pace, and the squires and messengers and guards all alike leave her unmolested as she walks unescorted. For all the wealth of royalty, privacy is a luxury that is very rarely hers.

            Odin takes his Odinsleep in a separate chamber quite near his own. It is both opulent and minimal, and Frigga has never felt any peace within its walls. The golden dory bothers her for all its symbolism, but Odin had taken to it in faith – it had been his father’s, and his father’s before. As she sits at his bedside, taking his warm hand in hers, her mind wanders. Her duties for the day are done; all councils have been attended, all pleas heard. Short of an emergency – there will not be one tonight – she may call this small hour before the evening meal her own time of peace. There are, of course, arrangements to make for the coming day, but the most pressing matter of hailing dressmakers and maids to ready the rooms has already been done. They will call for more cooks and bakers at dawn; the current King will surely call for a feast in proportions of excess as he has the centuries’ long habit of so doing.

            She thinks of his smiling face, seeing both the bearded man and the joyous child at once, and then thinks of the woman, Jane Foster, so small beside him, clever and fierce and proud. She thinks of warmth, smiles, tears, fire, and the blood that will come upon them soon, each in turn. This is her burden; to not let what she sees influence her actions. These things will come – such is the passage of time.

* * *

 

            Golden-eyed Heimdall turns his gaze momentarily to his realm and his queen, and sees a quiet, gleaming gold palace waiting in thick, rolling mists.


	8. When You Come Back

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Agent Barton is not the only one to ignore SHIELD paperwork.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We are progressing! That said, if crackfic is wrong, I don't want to be right. I swear this is a serious endeavour, though. I promise. Hold with me, here.
> 
> Champagne for Sarah for her patient beta-work. Thank you. Any lingering errors are mine.

            Darcy leaves the blanket fort of their creation when Thor sticks a curious head in, three hours into their Wii Wheel of Fortune marathon. She and Jane had been screeching at one another, the both of them at complete losses for what the phrase might be. Thor looked between them both with a good deal of concern, and managed to distract them long enough that the clock ran out without them.

            “We shall be dining soon,” he says by way of explanation. Both women groan, and Jane clutches her belly. Thor looks even more alarmed.

            “We finished a whole quart of ice cream,” Darcy supplies, and then she crawls out of the fort, giving Thor a half-hearted shove to get him out of her way. She gets to her feet, stretching, and lifts sweat-damp hair from the back of her neck. “Jane, come out!” she calls back. “It’s a freaking furnace in there.” The other woman only sticks her hand out, giving Darcy the finger.

            “The answer was Avril Lavigne,” she says. “Who the hell is Avril Lavigne?”

            ‘Fuck if I know,” is Darcy’s reply, and then she actually snags Jane’s hand, pulling her out to her shoulders.

            “Hey! Ow!” Jane protests, pink in the face. She amends, “Yeah, okay, it’s warm in there.” She shakes herself free of Darcy, only to have Thor take her hand as she gets to her feet. He had been kneeling, and rises with her.

            “What is this you’ve constructed?” Thor asks them. “Where did the couch go?”

            “You’ve never made a blanket fort?” Darcy demands with some genuine shock. Thor gives her a patient, blank look – the one he faces her with more often than not. Darcy looks at Jane, declaring “Yo, intergalactic princess, first line of business is the appropriation of cultural traditions outside of their original context.” With that, she breezes out of the apartment, yelling, “Don’t you dare miss the Last Supper!” over her shoulder.

            “Don’t call it that!” Jane yells back, but the door to the corridor is already falling shut. She turns to a bemused-looking Thor and by the hand tugs him back inside. He’s too big in the space they’d made, too tall and too broad, and Jane just scrunches her nose at him and pokes until he’s lying down. Then she climbs on top of him. “You’ve seriously never made a blanket fort?”

            “Forgive me,” he says with a teasing gravity, “but it seems a rather childish endeavour.” He rests one hand on the soft swell of her hip, the other he puts behind his head.

            “It’s supposed to be,” she says, a little indignant. “That’s the whole point.” Jane feels like he’s looking at her the same way he first eyed the Frankensteined toaster at the lab in New Mexico. “Kids make them all the time and use them in play-pretend games.”

            “And adults?” he asks skeptically.

            “Darcy’s idea,” she points out first, “mostly out of nostalgia, to go with the game and the ice cream. She thought I was doing too much science.”

            Thor hums in response, gently running his hand over the length of her side. The sound falls deeper into his chest, and Jane only catches the glint of mischief in his eyes before he suddenly reverses their positions, crashing through the couch-cushion walls and bringing the pilfered bed sheet ceiling down around them. Her startled laughter is muffled by their kisses, and when Thor refocuses his attention lower, Jane squeaks, “I thought you said dinner was soon!” Thor laughs against her collar bone, and the soft bristles of his beard leave her feeling warm all over.

            “The Lady Pepper informed me that a ‘godless amount’ of takeout has been ordered and shall arrive within the hour. Is that not soon?”

            She can hear the teasing tone in his voice, softer and more playful than outright sarcasm. “That’s called a white lie,” she complains, running her hands through his hair and bringing his mouth back up to hers, not really complaining at all.

* * *

 

            Darcy is lounging on one of the couches in Tony’s other, other living room, arguing with Clint over the likelihood of actual, proper flying saucers existing. Not Chitaurian sky-doos, _flying saucers._ She finds this to be an important distinction. Natasha is on Clint’s other side, her toes tucked under his thigh. Everyone else is perfectly aware that Thor and Jane are both absent, but Tony, the loudmouth, is too busy with General Tao to say anything, Pepper reclining against his shoulder.

            “I don’t mean --” she reiterates around a full mouth, cut off when Pepper openly laughs and Clint clocks her with a pillow, warning, “Manners!”

            “Ugh!” she pulls a stuck hair from her lip and flings the pillow down to the floor. “I don’t mean Godzilla-snake-behemoths and inter-dimensional flying phone boxes,” and Bruce stifles a laugh into his lo mien, wondering how everyone found out about his television choices. “Dammit, Clint,” Darcy concludes – which is how their debates usually end, Natasha thinks, “I mean Roswell. I mean Roswell-style flying fucking saucers.”

            “Easy, pussycat. No need to swear.” He puts down his beer on the low table in front of them, but before he can go any further Darcy mocks him with completely serious cat claws and a ‘grr.’ Natasha is silently disdainful.

            “If,” Clint continues conversationally, “space is infinite, and we then have to allow for infinite – you do know what ‘infinite’ means, right? – possible ways that life could exist. There are aliens; we all live with one, end of story. This means that your little Roswell, and anything else you can imagine, has got to be out there somewhere.”

            “But?” Darcy fishes.

            “But what’s the likelihood they’re stupid enough to come down here is the real question.”

            “Actually,” Steve interrupts, swinging into the room in dark chinos and a baby blue button-down – obvious remnants of a day spent dealing with the media – “I have two real questions. Where are Jane and Thor?” He pauses, picking up what looks like the two whole pizzas to himself, and Tony looks around the room, dismayed. “And the second: does Coulson know?”

            “Do I know what?”

            Everyone, to some degree, nearly jumps out of their skins, and a series of undignified sounds can be heard around the room. Steve, still standing, has clutched the stainless steel counter in a white-knuckle grip that leaves it twisted into the shape of his palm. Tony is quietly choking, and Darcy is behind the couch. In her defense, Bruce had momentarily gone an unfortunately familiar shade of grey-green. Pepper, in comparison, has laid a ladylike hand on her chest, doe-eyed.

            The assassins haven’t budged in the slightest, and Clint uses the moment to steal one of Darcy’s eggrolls.

            “Oh, no,” Tony coughs out, “I’m not going to the principal’s office for someone else. Jarvis, where are they?”

            “Sir,” the AI pauses momentarily, as if he had to actually stop and check, “Prince Thor and Dr. Foster are currently occupied.” _He even sounds a little bashful_ , Bruce thinks. The whole room is silent, taking in that little nugget of information, and then Darcy finally says:

            “Ten bucks they come back married.” Coulson is looking at her with what she personally classifies as _Blank Face No. Four: Keep Talking and I’ll Hurt You._ She simply settles onto the other couch, beside a finally-seated Steve.

            “Twenty,” comes a chorus of cynical voices.

             “Send in the cavalry,” Tony snaps to his AI. He reminds Steve of a small, growling dog.

            Coulson says, “No, Stark,” at the same time Clint and Natasha both reply, “Don’t call her that.” Jarvis simultaneously adds, “I do not recommend such a response, Sir.” Tony has the distinct feeling that he’s missing something.

            Clint casts a bemused glance around the room, and then adds, “Fifty says they come back with a kid.”

            “One hundred,” Natasha and Coulson reply in a matching, instantaneous monotone. Darcy wheels around dramatically, face incredulous. Phil has the audacity to give her a jaunty little grin. Steve has come to sit on the arm of the couch beside her, and looks at their handler like he doesn’t want to hear the words even as he’s saying them.

            “They’re going back to Asgard,” he explains, “at dawn tomorrow. Today. In ten hours.”

            Coulson remains in the doorway, but Pepper gestures him in. “Come eat something, Phil,” she sounds sympathetic. “There’s lots.”

            He steps into the room, sighing like a man beleaguered. In perfect unison both Clint and Natasha slide over, making a space between them. He sits, and Barton hands him a waxed cardboard container of fragrant orange duck just as Romanoff puts a pair of chopsticks under his nose. Coulson takes both proffered items without acknowledgement to where they suddenly appeared from. After several tidy bites, he asks, “How long-term is this arrangement?” breaking the uneasy quiet.

            Darcy says an articulate “Uhh,” at the same time Tony announces, “Foster’s going to meet the parents.”

            “Leave of absence for the purpose of inter-dimensional leisure-travel has paperwork,” Coulson complains. “Can someone explain why that wasn’t done first?” His tone, however, implies resignation to the matter.

            “Family emergency?” Bruce hazards, but immediately takes it back at the expressions that round on him. Coulson’s face doesn’t change in the slightest, and that worries Pepper more than the murderous glare Agent Barton has levelled on his fried rice. “Poorly phrased,” he amends. “More like Jane found something in Norway.” That gets Phil’s attention.

            “What kind of something?”

            “Not a weapon,” Darcy adds hastily to the conversation. Natasha looks at her coolly.

            “Books are the best weapons in the world, after your own two hands.”

            Coulson tries to bring them back to the present matter. “Why does the book have to go back to Asgard? And why did they have to go with it?” He sounds tired.

            Everyone glances around for a moment, and Tony and Bruce share an especially heavy look. “Because it details Thor’s life. And apparently Jane’s role therein,” Tony says. “And what’s more is that it’s chronologically way ahead of us. It’s their whole lives.”

            Coulson repeats himself. “Why’s it going to Asgard?”

            “Thor’s dad asked for it,” Darcy supplies, trading her Thai for a slice of Steve’s pizza.

            “We can’t read it,” Steve explains, “and neither could Thor.”

            “Who says we can’t?” The comment wins Coulson a handful of quizzical looks.

            “Jarvis,” Tony declares with a note of finality. Coulson’s flat, patient expression doesn’t change, and Tony reads it exactly for what it is. “No!” he cries. “No way. You do not have the secret power of reading ancient Asgardian diaries. Veto.”

            Coulson takes another bite of orange duck. Stark huffs indignantly, and Pepper pats his knee.

            “Phil,” she asks with genuine concern, “how is Director Fury going to handle all of this?”

            He looks back at her with warmth, but Darcy thinks that might just be a trick of the light. “As well as can be expected, I hope.” The agents on either side of him both stop eating. Clint has both eyebrows near his hairline, contemplating with a frown something in the foggy middle distance. Natasha has arched a scathing brow at the soda in her hands and looks considering – Bruce isn’t sure what, exactly, nor does he want to ask. They simultaneously look around their handler to one another, shrugging opposite shoulders in unison.

* * *

 

                 The room goes back to quiet banter for a few short minutes before familiar voices can be heard from the hall.

            “Because I promised Darcy we would. And, we really should say goodbye tonight, rather than keep everyone up until dawn.”

            “Our friends in times of tranquility lounge for hours. There’s simply no reason to have ceased our --”

            “Thor!” Jane complains.

            His voice drops to a much lower register, but still carries clearly down the tiled hallway. Everyone in the den shares an unsettled look, worried over how much they’re about to overhear – with the sole exception of Tony, who looks several shades of gleeful. Darcy bravely steps up to the challenge presented. She skids over to the doorway in her stocking feet, yelling “Public hallway, private conversation!” with her fingers jammed into her ears. Thor and Jane have stopped mid-stride, expressions bewildered.

            “If you weren’t done doing Disney,” Darcy scolds, “you should’ve stayed upstairs.”

            “Is that what the kids are calling it these days?” Stark asks brightly.

            Natasha surprises everyone by humming ‘Some Day My Prince Will Come.’ Coulson contains a snort with some questionable grace; Clint looks at her sourly. She doesn’t acknowledge either of them.

            Still standing just outside the doorway, Thor leans down to whisper into Jane’s ear. “What must they have thought we were speaking of?”

            Jane is equally bemused, and shrugs one shoulder, bumping gently against his arm. She thought it was quite rational, keeping Thor from dismantling the bedframe for a larger fort. They follow a retreating Darcy into the room, but are separated quickly – Pepper rises to embrace Jane, and Steve shakes hands with Thor with a surplus of back-clapping and good cheer. The others give them milder welcomes, but Thor singles out Phil.

            “Son of Coul,” he booms, reaching to shake his hand as well. Coulson momentarily looks a little invested in his hand, but seems to deem it a worthy sacrifice. The short exchange is so intense that Clint and Natasha sway with the momentum that carries away from Phil through the couch cushions. All three look equally bothered.

            “All done packing?” Bruce enquires at Jane’s elbow. She’s just nicked a slice from Thor’s whole pizza, and is a little startled to be caught with her mouth full. She starts to say something unintelligible, gives up, and swallows thickly before she croaks out a response.

            “Yeah, almost,” she wipes delicately at the corners of her mouth. “Sorry,” she adds, and Bruce holds in a grin.

            Darcy interrupts from across the room. “Did you pack the coffee?”

            “Crap,” Jane replies.

            “Got it covered,” Tony calls. “Jarvis, get You to pack a duffle of the good Guatemalan dark roast. Actually,” he says, after receiving a dark look from Pepper, “maybe get Dummy to do it.”

            “Thank you, Tony,” Jane says sincerely. Thor nods, looking away momentarily from his conversation with Coulson.

            “It is a wonderful drink indeed.”

            Tony looks aghast. “The Space Vikings don’t have coffee, but we’re the primitive ones?”

            Thor looks vaguely affronted. “I have never said such a thing.”

            “You never did,” Pepper agrees, placating, stepping to interrupt their line of sight to one another. Thor catches Jane looking at him a little imploringly, and so even unsatisfied as he is, he leaves it be – he and the Man of Iron seem to come to many such uneasy agreements.

            “Doctor Foster,” Phil calls her over, “if there’s nothing more pressing, you’ve neglected some paperwork.”

            “Don’t tell me you guys have permission slips for interplanetary field trips.” She looks a little flabbergasted. Coulson’s face remains unapologetically impassive.

            “You know,” Clint interjects, “I once had to file a second mission report because the first one was mangled by a purebred Dandie Dinmont Terrier.”

            Jane doesn’t know quite what to do with that information. Coulson elaborates, somewhat. “Blood and charcoal on tourist maps of Nairobi _do not_ count as mission reports.”

            A smile tugs at one corner of Natasha’s mouth. “I liked that dog,” she adds fondly.

            Clint looks around Phil's shoulder in distaste. “I know you did. I had to file a report on that, too.”

            Phil looks thoughtful. “I really appreciate that you’re always seventy-two hours late with your reports. It’s like clockwork.”

            “I aim to please.”

            Phil sighs like a man in pain. Natasha looks like she’s heard that line thirty-eight times too many. Darcy, eavesdropping on the far couch, chokes on thin air.

            “You did not just say that.”

            Clint is far too pleased with himself. Natasha comments to Phil under her breath, “I told you we should have kept the dog.”

            “It was both a breach of protocol and a risk to this organisation’s internal security,” Phil recites. He’s said that far too many times to the people in this room.

            “That’s what he said about you,” Clint points out helpfully, giving Natasha a look that she doesn’t rise to. “And you,” he says, nodding to Thor.

* * *

 

            Out on the balcony the three SHIELD agents all stay a good deal distance back from the action. Even being within ten feet of the caged Tesseract makes Clint feel like gravity has tilted fifteen degrees forward and not bothered to tell him. It makes his eyesight sharper; pulling at all of his senses like it remembers him. He curses himself internally for even thinking such a thing, rather than seriously contemplating if a magical box of energy could remember recall the people it once claimed. Clint’s vision feels hyper-real, like how hallucinations are too clear, but the benefit is that he can lip-read every part of the conversation. Even what Darcy says - lost in the vacuum that surrounds them that close to the cube - he can decipher. Her reflection is perfectly clear in the shine of Aesirs’ armour.

            The cage the Tesseract is in has been modified from the last time he saw it – now it bears four handles instead of two. Clint watches as Jane’s load of resources and research is divided between the four travellers. They all wave when it’s their turn – Jane smiles bravely at the trio while Thor only nods respectfully. Clint feels like Phil is the only one of the three who smiles back at the scientist with any kind of believability.

            Thor is the last one to grip his handle on the cube and when he does, Darcy, Tony, and Steve all take hurried steps back. Tony falls even with a tired Pepper, who waves one last time as Thor turns the handle to home. Clint’s heightened senses hear the soft click, and then the blue light swells, swallowing up the figures inside its glow. A subsonic plus moves through the air, and then the blue light retracts into itself, into nothing. Clint’s impression of gravity suddenly goes back to normal, and he fights the impulse to stagger back a step with the relief. His natural senses, extraordinary as they are, feel like his head is full of cotton batting in comparison. He still hears Coulson’s controlled breath beside him. Natasha is better than him at pretending not to notice.

            Now that the fanfare is over, Tony, Pepper, and Bruce all head back inside quickly. Clint can hear a muffled conversation – Tony blustering at Pepper’s assistant, saying that the Stark Industries CEO is out of commission for the next eight hours.

            “I did it to you all the time,” he argues.

            “The difference is that in both of these cases, _I_ am the one running the show,” Pepper counters. A compromised solution is called at hour fours, and Pepper slips off her heels, recess accepted.

            “Pick your battles carefully,” she advises her frazzled, newly-grey PA, “and do not let China do anything rash. And _do not_ listen to Phelps. And don’t let Happy get involved.” There’s silence as the PA’s heels clack away down the hall. The last thing Clint can make out is in Tony's clear tenor.

            “No, no, no! Pep, go to bed, for the love of God. People with your kind of power should not be sleep deprived.”

            “I live with _you_!” is the muffled but discernable response.

            Natasha leaving his side brings Clint back to the present. Phil shifts his weight foot to foot.

            “Did it…” Phil starts to ask, uncertain of himself in a way that Clint completely understands and completely doesn’t like.

            “Yes, sir,” Clint replies crisply.

            “Okay.” Phil, too, slips away, joining Natasha as they head back inside.

            Clint thinks dawn is the best time to watch people and see through their actions with absolute clarity. _You’re awake at the crack of dawn for a very specific reason,_ he says to himself. Steve, he sees, is now standing at the railing of the balcony, elbows propped to support his weight. He’s facing out towards the harbour, but Clint can tell by the line of his spine that he’s looking somewhere else entirely. Darcy is still standing in the middle of the distance between them, arms crossed over her chest. She’s staring at the spot of ground Jane and Thor and their travelling companions have just vacated with a blank expression. _Her reason is very different than his._

            Darcy must feel him staring, because her posture shifts and her eyes slowly sweep up to his. “What are you thinking?” she asks, once he’s in range of her whisper.

            “That was weird,” he supplies lightly. It’s not an untruth, but she narrows her eyes at him, and so Clint derails her.

            “Captain Lovesick looks like a kicked puppy.”

            “Can you not?” she says snarkily, even as she wraps her arms around his torso in a brief hug. “Are you okay?” she asks him. Clint hums in response, passing his hand over her shoulder a few times as an apology for his abject avoidance of that question.

            “It’s comfortable, and you’re nosey,” she tells him, cheek against his chest. “Leave it alone.” Clint realises that it’s Darcy-code for ‘I have no fucking clue.’

            “Never,” he says, stepping out of her relaxing arms. “That’s the antithesis of my job description.”

            “I’m not in your job description.”

            “I’ve pencilled you in.”

            Darcy really can’t tell if he’s being serious. She would bet on no, but it’s Clint Barton, and rationality isn’t always on his invite-list. She knows that Tasha’s his next of kin, and that Coulson’s his emergency contact, but she’s unaware that he’d pulled strings and managed to get her listed as family on his will. Clint plans to keep it that way.

            “Consider me un-nosey,” he says, “and go talk to him. Talking is good.”

            “I’m taking your stellar relationship advice?”

            “Hey, Tasha hasn’t killed me yet.”

            “ _Yet_ ,” Natasha mutters dismissively from a few paces behind them. Darcy startles. Clint knew she was there.

            “That’s my cue,” he tells her, giving her a gentle nudge away. “Take a day or two and talk; comfortable is good, but it doesn’t mean you know what you’re doing.” Clint is looking at Darcy like he’s just explained that the sky is blue and water is wet. Natasha has the beginning of a smile on her lips, and she manages to convey all of ‘good morning,’ ‘good luck,’ and ‘see you soon’ at once. Darcy turns away from both of them without another word.

            She walks towards Steve quietly; he’s still contemplating the faraway dockyards. She waits for him just outside of his reach and he picks up on her presence immediately.

            “Hi,” he twists his torso just slightly to the right, giving her his full attention. Darcy thinks that the sunrise is doing lovely things for his eyes, that they’re the same shifting shade of blue as the sky. He’s looking at her with such focus that for a moment she feels untethered. _Oh, crap,_ she thinks, _Clint’s got a point about the talking thing._

            “Hi back,” she replies, feeling out of sorts and working on not letting it show. She approaches the railing, and he shifts to the side so they’re face to face, not much more than a foot between them. Darcy glance back in the direction of the tower’s interior, but she already knows that the SHIELD agents have left them alone. Steve follows the quick flicker of her gaze.

            “You okay?” he asks gently.

            “Yeah,” she dismisses, even as her belly flops. “A little beat, but okay.” _Exactly when did you go and get tangled up with Captain America?_  she interrogates herself. _Because 0/10, would not recommend. Jesus._ What she says is: “I thought you could use some company.” It’s not a lie.

            Something flickers across his face – an emotion that passes too quickly for her to name. It doesn’t change his stance, but the air around them suddenly feels thinner, and Darcy shivers. Sunrise in November is not a warming experience. He gives her half a smile and then ducks his head in a way that means he’s about to bail on her, and even with her clammy hands and nervous belly she’s not going to let him do that.

            “You just looked a little… glum,” she finishes lamely.

            Steve swipes his palm across his mouth, cheek, and chin, like he’s momentarily evaluating how much stubble has grown in. Now that she’s thinking of it, his five o’clock shadow looks a lot more like midnight. Before he answers her, he drops his gaze to the railing. Darcy has mirrored his position, propped up on her elbow, and it leaves their hands only inches apart. She watches his fingers twitch like he’s going to reach for her, but he aborts the movement before it becomes anything.

            Darcy, feeling brave, reaches with one finger and gently brushes his knuckles. He looks at her squarely again, and she can practically see the gears turning inside his head. His brow creases, relaxes, and this time he does reach for her hand. She laces their fingers together while he’s not looking.

            “There’s something I need to do,” he tells her, the conflict writ over his features. “Something I’ve been putting off since I woke up.”

            Darcy keeps a blank face, waiting for him. It takes Steve a moment to find the words, but he eventually asks her, “Come with me?”

            She smiles softly. “Of course.” The sun has finally climbed over the horizon, and it’s an intense streak of orange and pink just above the water. The indigo of the sky is quickly turning pale, and Steve watches as the first few rays of sunlight glint off the loose curls of her hair, gleaming like burnished copper. He thinks about brushing it away from her face, but catches the motion before it goes any farther than his shoulder. When she shivers in the chill again, he opens his body language to her, and she tucks herself against his side. Their other hands are still joined on the railing, and Steve hears the echo of an old showtune in his memory. He rests his chin atop her head and wills the nostalgia to pass.

            “Where are we going?” Darcy asks. It’s just as well she does – Steve can’t remember the rest of the song.

            “Upstate Vermont, there’s someone else I need to say goodbye to.”

            They stay like that at the balcony until the sun is all the way above the harbour, glaring orange and yellow off of the polished glass and steel structures that sprawl over the city. One hundred feet below them, Midtown roars to wakefulness. The first frost of the year melts as the shadows retreat.

_This is New York,_ she tells herself, _and it’ll still be here when you come back._

 

 


	9. Vexation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Thor and the Warriors Three get foolishly drunk and embarrass themselves only slightly more than they embarrass Jane and Sif.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sarah, you are a gift. Thank you.

 

When Thor comes to retrieve Jane from their chambers to escort her to the welcoming feast, he finds himself standing in her doorway, tongue-tied. All the finery he has ever seen in court does not compare to the gown she’s chosen for the evening. The velvet is a striking, vibrant red that matches his cape, and her wrists are bracketed by charcoal grey and gold vambraces that are feminine ghosts of his own. The material clings to her, cut in a clean, straight line across her collar and throat. Over it, in the place of the day’s solid armour, is a black and gold filigree bodice. It shapes her figure in a way that Thor finds both fierce and vulnerable, and is covered in a fine pattern of roses and war-hammers. The petals and shafts glitter with black opals and rubies. She wears no other jewellery besides the thin strands of rubies that have been braided into her hair, done in a twisting, loose curl that falls low against her nape.

In her doorway, struck dumb, he brushes the pad of his thumb over her cheek. “My love,” he says at last, though he momentarily finds it a gargantuan task to go any further, his chest welling with the affection, the gratitude, and the sheer hope that the willful pride in her eyes fuels in him. “You are absolutely a vision,” he tells her, but the concern creeps into his voice all the same. “Do not misunderstand – my heart thunders with your beauty to feed it --” and Jane arches an unsympathetic eyebrow at his oblivious words, “but I worry you will lose yourself if you seek a disguise.”

She takes his hand in both of hers. “I know what you’re trying to say,” she agrees, because he had been with her in the library, bearing witness to her diatribe against dresses, muttered under her breath as she moved from shelf to shelf with an armload of ancient texts and her own silk skirts, generally getting nowhere fast. “This isn’t a disguise.” She looks down purposefully at their matching vambraces, the long train of her gown identical to the drag of his cape. “This is a first impression,” she says decisively, nodding to herself. She then lowers their hands and turns to lead them away, and suddenly his tongue is thick in his mouth, and he finds himself nearly choking on nothing at all. The steps she has taken turn her back to him, and the sight of her renders him speechless. Her skirts billow outward with her purposeful walk, and the delicate bodice glints in the light of the torches, its stones reflecting fire. The dress itself is cut away in a long, sharp vee that meets in the small of her back. With her hair curled up and away, it leaves the whole length of her spine exposed under the metalwork. He rocks back on his heels like he’s been struck, and when she tugs on his hand he nearly leaps forward to match her pace.

Jane, aware of Thor’s distraction, only just manages to keep from sniggering the whole way to the feasting hall. Thor, for his part, works adamantly on not blushing to the same shade as their costumes. He loses focus even as they walk, feet taking him to the Great Hall on memory alone. He only backpedals when he realises the guards have already swung open the doors to announce them.

“Jane!” he stops in his tracks, “My father is still in the Odinsleep --” but his explanation and apology both come too late, and are drowned out. The four sentries have already entered, and they bellow in unison into the boisterous – and quickly silencing – crowd.

"The Mighty Thor of Asgard, King of the Realm Eternal!” they boom, and the hall is momentarily still. Thor and Jane step through the doorway, hand in hand, and the guards’ voices rise again. “The Lady Jane Foster of Midgard, Scholar of Stars!”

_It’s got a ring to it,_ Jane thinks for moment, before even her own thoughts are deafened by the absolute shaking roar of the crowd, all five hundred warriors and their kin. They all rise to their feet, some small children being hoisted like mead cups, others still climbing on tables while their mothers and minders cheer with abandon. Thor grins hugely with happy recognition, waving at the tables as the pair makes their way up the wide centre aisle. Jane keeps the surprise off her face as best she can, holding instead a sincere smile and a smaller wave. She’s grateful when Thor puts his arm around her, because the wall of sound is enough to make her think she could stumble backward.

It takes them an age to make it to the front of the room, to the steps that will take them up to the raised royal table. The king’s seat is empty, waiting for Thor, but to its right the Queen stands, clapping softly with a proud, quiet smile on her lips. The place to the left of the throne-seat is empty, but immediately to its left is the Lady Sif, and to her left, Hogun, who Jane thinks isn’t looking all that grim.  Then there’s Fandral – another familiar face split into a whooping grin, and then to the Queen’s right is Volstagg, the spokesman of the Warriors Three. His wife and their eldest son are beside him. Jane knows from stories that his brood is much larger, but correctly assumes that the others are either with family in the crowds or are too small for such an evening.

Thor releases the fingers on her hips to instead delicately take her hand, and Jane uses her free one to gather as much of her skirts as she politely can, clearing lengths and layers of silk from under the tread of her boots. She follows his cue when they’re level with the table, turning back to face the hall. The cheering that had nearly died rises back up in a swell until Thor holds out a quieting hand. He is still smiling broadly, but the silence he asks for falls like a sudden snow across hundreds of bodies as they sit. Jane sees a pair of small brothers atop a table freeze mid-tussle, fists in one another’s shirts and still shoving absently, both trying to get the best look while still holding tight to his foe.

“Friends!” Thor bellows, and a hundred arms raise mead cups and wine goblets in recognition, but the quiet holds. “Warriors, brothers-in-arms, my kin,” he calls out, “the honour of this welcome is ours,” and Jane wasn’t expecting to get drawn into things so quickly; the smile that comes to her face is automatic and a little stiff. “I thank you for your swords and your loyalty, just as I thank you now for a king’s welcome-home. You honour us well, my beloved and I,” and this time cheers do ring out, but they are barely enough to cover the rush of whispers. Thor ignores them even as Jane’s breath catches in her throat. All she can think is, ‘ _Now he’s done it.’_

“…but honour us better, commands your king, and show me what it means to feast!” The whispers are drowned away under a sea of sound as the wild cheering starts anew. Thor waves grandly once more, turning to look at Jane. His grin doesn’t falter, but rather gently relaxes away. One corner of his mouth pulls up, and he asks her a dozen silent questions all at once. _My people are your people. Are you all right? Do you accept?_ And underneath those, _Can you be their queen?_

Finding his face and eyes unchanged by the hullaballoo is soothing, in a way. This, to him, is natural. It may take her a while, but Jane has never let small – or large – fears stand in her way. The smile she gives him back says a hundred things to him, but the loudest of all is ‘ _yes.’_  Thor then sees what he missed in the beginning – the fierce pride in her eyes and the conviction in her shoulders. The woman before him – in some ways so far away from the curious, brave scientist he met in the dark – had swept away her desert dust and glowed in confidence with the beauty she had never before displayed but had always, always possessed.

She turns away from him to face the crowd, and without over-analysing her actions, she presses a kiss to her fingertips and blows it away into a wave that matches Thor’s still-raised hand. Impossibly, the noise hits an absolute crescendo, and a chant of _Long Live the King_ echoes for a moment. Thor has already turned away, but waits for Jane before leading her to her seat at the table. She nods and waves small hellos down its length as Thor moves purposefully from person to person. She watches from the corner of her eye as he goes to his mother first, kissing her hand and then pressing her palm against his heart. He leans in closer and the pair share whispers; Jane isn’t given the chance to hear them.

"That went rather well.”

She turns to face Sif, immediately to her left. “It, um… Yeah.” Jane stumbles over her words. A serving maid has already placed a glass of honeyed wine before her, and she reaches for it as a crutch. She swallows without tasting, breathes deeply, and then continues with only a little more confidence. “It’s more than a little overwhelming,” she says, “and I forgot about the on-the-spot speeches.”

Sif looks at her sympathetically. She knows from stories and experience that where Thor is vocal and open about all his love and devotion, Jane carries the very same fire – burning just as hot and bright – but guards its flame from the sight of others. _Private devotion is not weaker,_ she thinks to herself, _though perhaps this is a love less private and more subtle._ Sif arches a pointed brow at Jane’s costume, unafraid to follow her curiosity.

“And whose idea was this?”

Jane flusters. “I was attacked by dressmakers--” she starts.

“To have heard her!” Thor adds as he finally seats himself. “Never before had I heard you threaten another, Jane, so unprovoked. They were only doing their duties.” Jane gives him a slightly sour look, and he laughs honestly. “And how well they have done them!” he finalises, with a nod.

Jane takes the moment to stack her plate with things that are all vaguely familiar. _There’s only so many ways to roast a potato,_ she reasons optimistically. Then she catches Hogun’s expectant expression, like she’s supposed to be qualifying Thor’s… boasting? _Was that boasting?_ she wonders. Sheepishly, she looks to Sif. “I might have had a few suggestions about where else they could stick their pins and needles.”

“No!” Fandral barks a laugh, having come behind Jane and Sif’s chairs to greet her properly. “Surely such fine lips do not shape such uncouth words,” he scolds, but there is light in his eyes and she can see him restraining his laughter.

Thor joins him, nodding as he gulps at his mead. “A sight indeed,” he says, sounding oddly nostalgic.

Sif, meanwhile, is grinning with all her teeth, and Hogun’s stoic face has a pleased crinkle around his eyes.

“Speaking once more of sights,” Sif corrals the conversation back, “there is a statement in this metalwork.”

Fandral, who’d been halfway through an excited recitation to Thor, stops, turns, and observes with startling focus now that his attention has been caught. “Roses,” he says, “and are those… warhammers?”

Jane pins him with as brave a look as she can muster. “I thought it would be good to make a statement.” She aims for breezy confidence, but her tone falls short, landing somewhere near airy.

“We match,” Thor supplies helpfully.

“Our Jane appears to have the right of it,” the Queen says from over Fandral’s other shoulder. Hogun is the only one not startled to see her there, but everyone recovers quickly enough. “I shall leave the rest of this eve’s hosting to you, my son,” though she’s clearly addressing the whole troupe of them. “My dear,” she turns calm eyes on Jane, “do not rush your evening, but please, find me before you retire. I will be in my chambers,” and she then looks to the group again. “Surely, one of you would escort her?”

Four faces give short nods in unison, and Volstagg adds a distracted, “Anything you desire, my Queen!” even as he appears to be in a serious conversation with his adolescent son. At least, Jane thinks he’s sulking like a teenager. Before the Queen departs she lays a soft hand on Jane’s exposed shoulder, and then quietly turns away, the heavy velvet of her gown muffling the soft sounds of her slippers on the flagstones.

Jane turns to Thor. “I thought you said real introductions were going to happen tomorrow!” she whispers fiercely. Thor only grins at her around a mouthful.

Fandral nudges her shoulder. “You’ve nothing to fret over,” he says in a conspiratorial tone, “you’ve made a winning first impression, to be sure.”

Volstagg rounds to the other side of the table, alone. Sif catches sight of his boy skipping away, looking like he’s trying to snag his small sister’s attention. They are several years apart, but they go everywhere as a duo, and Sif can only imagine what sort of mischief they’re planning with their parents and minders occupied. Always an ally, Sif says nothing as the pair duck out of the Great Hall.

“There is absolutely no question of at whose side you belong, my fair lady,” Volstagg announces even as the bench groans under his girth. “Nor of how glad we are to see you here!” The other warriors – Thor excluded – raise their mead cups in matching salute as he lets out a short, inarticulate shout that Jane thinks actually says a great deal. When the mead is drunk and the serving girls come to refill their cups, Jane smiles and tells him a sincere ‘thank you.’

Fandral joins Volstagg on the opposite side, stealing a leg of what might be an entire lamb from under his companion’s nose in such a way that earns him a disgruntled roar from the wronged man and a hearty laugh from everyone who saw. “Now, tell us,” he commands in a practiced stage whisper, “this feasting pales in comparison to the pomp that should have accompanied your arrival.” The others nod in agreement, but it’s Hogun who nicks the punchline.

“Quite simply: you are as welcome as you are surprising, Doctor Foster, and we ask what wind brought you here in such a hurry?”

“If my mother did not share her motives, then perhaps it is best that we wait,” Thor cuts him off tidily. “Is it not fair to think that I would show my beloved my home, and perhaps nothing more?”

“You have not your brother’s tongue, my King,” Fandral chides. “You as clear as day have said that motives are at work under these courtly appearances.”

Sif interrupts. “You have our trust implicit and unwavering,” she says to Jane, “but tell us this: will you need our swords?” The latter is directed to Thor.

He sighs heavily, and he and Jane share a look that does not escape their audience. He inclines his head almost imperceptibly – all that gives the motion away is the gentle slip of braided length of chain in his hair over his shoulder, though his whole body seems perfectly still. Jane, in response, takes a steadying breath and allows it to push her shoulders back. Sif thinks if she had not been so close as to hear the small woman breathe, she might not have noticed at all.

Volstagg, apparently, sees even more than she does, and their eyes meet across the table in a familiar way. _Do you see what I see?_ his expression asks. Her own arched brow replies, _Do you see as_ I _see?_

It is Jane who breaks the silence, but as she makes to speak Thor catches her wrist loosely in his hand, as if he might dissuade her, even too late. “I can’t promise that,” she says to Sif, “and I can’t promise that we won’t, either.”

The Warriors all sit very still for a moment.

“I found something on Earth. A document,” she says, trying to explain things carefully.

“Jane,” Thor quietly sighs her name, but his massive hand merely cups around her slender wrist, and he makes no further motion to stop her.

“But we haven’t deciphered all of it, yet,” she adds hastily. “But some of its images were rather… suggestive. I came here with it because Thor thinks his father is the best authority to go by, and I agree with him.” She looks earnestly to the faces watching her. “It would take months, maybe even years to translate it into something we could read with Earth’s current technology, and there’s still no guarantee that we wouldn’t lose the more delicate translations.” The faces around her are patient, but not really comprehending. “It might also be time-sensitive.” Unlike she hopes, the phrase doesn’t garner any kind of reaction. _And why should it?_ she thinks. _They live for thousands of years. Impressing them with a single moment isn’t going to work._

“Let us leave it until my father wakes from the Odinsleep and can tell us what it says in truth,” Thor says with finality. It sets a spark in Jane’s mind to burning.

“But couldn’t your mother read it, too?” she asks honestly.

“No.” His answer is short, and Jane is taken aback. She’s heard that tone before, but never directed at her.

Sif has taken leaps and bounds where Jane stumbles, however, and her tone is flinty. “There’s the truth of this. Only one thing has any law over my Queen,” she speaks past Jane, directly to Thor, and though his face is stormy she does not lessen her charge. “Why not be frank, Thor? Your lady speaks as a scholar truly, for she speaks not in full for the hesitance of causing misinformation,” followed by, to Jane, “a wise course, to be sure. But _you_ sit here and cut your teeth against a secret your lady knows not.”

“Sif, enough,” Thor says, and rather than booming his voice rolls low like thunder. “Do you think this world – our world - is not at best entirely overwhelming for her? That perhaps I wished for Jane to meet my family and companions first only as such? Then to see the royalty, and only after to see you as gods?”

Jane interrupts him testily. “I don’t like the impression that there’s something you’re not telling me,” she counters, “and for all that I can kind of see where you’re coming from, I haven’t gone misty at your powers. Stark’s the only one with a broken atheist complex he has to glue back together. As far as I’m concerned, you’re a slightly medieval knight with a magic hammer and also – more importantly - someone I care for a great deal. Your narrated walk in the garden is my _Shakespeare in the Park_.” And though they surely don’t understand all of her references, both Fandral and Volstagg look genuinely impressed.

“Not a mouse at all,” Fandral announces, and though Thor has yet to look Sif in the eye, a smile pulls at her lips. That his closest companions approve so well of Jane as to swear their truth and loyalty to her, not because of her status at his side, but as a friend in her own right gives his heart an easy peace. That the first blush of it comes against him – in Sif’s clear eyes, for being protective where he has no right – makes him rueful in a superficial way. His friends, for their millennia together, know and read him well.

“And even our King is proud,” Volstagg teases. “Such, I say, is a sign of a well-made match that a man can bear his lady’s scolding and be proud of her mettle.”

Jane is still looking at him a little sourly, but she has not taken her hand away from him, so Thor does not count losses there. He gently closes his hand around her wrist to pull it into his lap, one thumb tracing over her knuckles. He looks back at her carefully, and his silent apology is silently accepted. Then, he replies to Volstagg. “Where anyone gets this idea of mousiness I know not,” and Jane nearly groans, because this is Thor’s favourite story to tell. “Not only did she make such fantastic discoveries that other scholars could scarcely believe her – ideas and facts so wild and new that her own rulers stole them out of fear--” at which Sif makes an outraged sound, having apparently not heard that part before, “ –upon my arrival to Midgard, ran me clean over with a truck.”

“Darcy--” Jane interjects unsuccessfully.

“-- Claims it was your responsibility for wresting the steering mechanism from her very hands.”

“You mean those small metal carriages that run as fast as Sleipnir?” Fandral asks.

“The trucks are the big ones,” Sif answers, distracted.

“Twice!” Thor adds with a flourish, as if that makes things better. Their company laughs – at whose expense, Jane isn’t sure, because she’s chuckling, too, and trying to hide behind her hand.

“Can we not?” she asks plaintively, before sobering. “Besides, all of these jokes haven’t distracted me. What is Sif talking about? And if _you_ don’t tell me, you’ve got to realise I’ll just ask her instead.” Her tone is neither demanding nor angry. She understands that their lives have been very, very different – where she has always challenged and pushed and refused to be sheltered, always independent, Thor lived in a world where the right words could rend a person apart; the monsters in stories at bedtime were real foes that felled real warriors. Much more quietly, she leans into his shoulder, twisting over the arm of her chair. Thor follows her motion, bending close so her lips are against his cheek, understanding the look in her eyes that said this was a much more private comment.

“I’ve made my promises, Thor. I’m not going to leave you, and I’m not going to give up without a fight. Say what you need to, please, don’t keep secrets. We both know that doesn’t end well.” She then pulls away slightly so she can look him in the eye. “We’re in this together,” she tells him softly. “I promise.”

She expects the heavy look her statement earns her, but she does not expect the kiss that follows. It is sudden and fierce and he cradles her face in both his palms. One of her own hands grips his wrist tightly, not to push him away but to hold him with her, an action that says _I’m with you_ more loudly than any words. While still mild – just an intense press of barely-opened lips – it does not lack for passion. Jane is dimly aware of a roar, but it sounds as loudly within her own head as without, so she doesn’t immediately notice its source until Thor gently pulls away, resting their foreheads together for a moment before looking out to the rest of the hall.

Beside her, Sif is using a gleaming dagger to check her nails. Across the table, Volstagg is chowing down with what Jane can only call athleticism, Hogun is looking plainly out to the feasting crowd, not a notion of anything on his face, while Fandral studiously scrutinises the ceiling. In short: each of them perfectly ignoring a stolen moment of intimacy.

The five hundred feasting warriors, however, have no such sense of delicacy, and are nearly riotous. Thor laughs along with them.

“It appears we’ve made ourselves into an accidental spectacle,” he says to the table, without a single whit of remorse.

“This is not what your mother meant when she said to host,” Sif says hotly, not looking away from her blade.

“But where’s the fun in the proper way?” he teases, rising to his feet.

Jane tugs discreetly at the corner of his tunic. “You are so not off the hook, hot-shot.”

Thor poses with indignation. “I am not an archer,” he says crossly, before snorting at his own joke and smiling at Jane winningly. “No?” he asks, with no hidden delight, “not even when I do this?” He leans back down, takes her hand, and kisses her knuckles in a way that echoes of a windy desert.

Sif and the Warriors Three all groan in unison. Loudly. Thor takes a step back and to the side, and then springs over the table, landing lightly on his feet on the other side. If possible, the hall cheers louder.

“I say this sight suits me well!” he bellows out to the crowd, arms open wide. “Fine food and wine made better by the company they’re in,” he compliments his legion. “But tell me, friends, how do we of Asgard call this a _proper_ feast?” and the ruckus hesitates momentarily in confusion, though they stay on their feet.

“How do we call this a feast,” he repeats, “when I see no bards, I hear no minstrels? Let there be music,” he calls, “let there be song!” The hall positively erupts into activity, instruments coming from thin air. Warriors in armour and boys in patched tunics alike congregate into clumps of bowed heads, tuning strings and hashing out last-minute arrangements.

* * *

 

Fandral is still chuckling over a line from the middle – something about cows and chickens that Jane didn’t really catch. Volstagg looks like he’s halfway to making a comment, but when their gazes meet they only succeed in aggravating their laughter to new heights. Thor smiles with them, and he turns to Jane in a moment of quiet.

“For all they call me King, my love, the jester’s hat is surely mine alone.”

“I take it that the wedding dress wasn’t a one-off, then?” she asks, cheeky. Thor lets out a full laugh at that, and Fandral barks out in surprise.

“How in the Nine do you know about that?” he demands, red-faced with laughter. Even Hogun looks well on his way to smiling. In his defense, Jane hasn’t been keeping track of how much mead their table has been putting away, though the serving girls never allow their cups to stay empty.

Thor bats a hand in his general direction, as if to dismiss him – but Volstagg is already in the thick of another story, and this one has Fandral in figurative stitches, holding at his sides and becoming progressively more breathless. Finding himself forgotten, Thor gives that same hand to Jane, and he gently brings her up to her feet. The crowd sends out the odd wolf-whistle and a general consensus of ‘kiss her,’ but they go ignored.

“Allow me,” he intones quietly, “to call a bard forth for you – a minstrel to sing something in your honour. This eve belongs as much to you as it does to us,” he sweeps a hand behind him, to indicate the table they’ve moved away from where the Warriors Three and the Lady Sif are assuredly _not_ eavesdropping to the best of their abilities.

Jane is distracted, but insistent. “No, Thor,” she says, “they don’t know anything about me.”

“My fair lady,” Fandral calls, walking to them around the table and having entirely given up on the idea of not listening-in, “it does one quite a feeling of pride to be sung of, and more’s the matter, we have all already impressed upon our poets not to ignore your feats.” The two men share an odd, calculating look, and Jane can do little more than squawk as they each take a hand and a hip and lift her to standing on the dining table.

“Oh, my God,” she nearly screeches, and for a moment she even thinks she’s brave enough to jump back down, but while Thor is commanding the howling hall, his three male companions are pleading with her to stay up there.

“Never have mine eyes seen a man more in love,” wheedles Fandral.

“When you’re not besotted with your own reflection!” Volstagg counters, but then adds a convincing, “So by all rights, he would know,” to Jane.

Hogun is normally far from verbose, but the evening’s mead has loosened his tongue eloquently. “It is not unusual or untoward for an Aesir of nobility to hold a court of minstrels solely to sing the praises of his lady, Doctor Foster,” and she’s all the more inclined to believe him simply because he addresses her properly. “While it may seem childish in your eyes, our Mighty Thor is only acting from his heart. There is no embarrassment to be had but his own, should his words pale --”

“But that’s why he sings last!” Fandral cries with gusto. “He’s given the chance to steal the verses from their tongues!”

“You’re kidding, right?” Jane whispers down fiercely. “The Vikings never did this!”

“Odin Allfather was only with your ancestors for a very short while, and he and the Queen were not yet wed. There would have been no display.” She hasn’t moved an inch from her seat behind Jane, and her only role in the whole farce has been ensuring that Jane’s skirts don’t knock over the mead cups. “Best to just let him burn it out of his system,” Sif advises the other woman.

“They’ve never done this to you, have they?” Jane asks, incredulous.

The Warriors chuckle uncomfortably, and Sif’s smile is what can only be classified as ‘dangerous.’

“Some have tried,” is all she says, and nothing more the matter comes up because Thor is suddenly before her, begging for Jane’s attention.

“My love,” he says, gathering her hands in his. Even though she’s standing on the table, he comes up nearly to her elbows. At this angle – and with the foolish, confident shine of liquor in his eyes – she thinks he could still manage to be intimidating if not for the particularly ruddy shade of his cheeks. She gives him her best impression of Natasha’s glare, but obviously misses her mark because he just blinks at her owlishly twice before launching into his reasoning. “My companions have surely by now explained to you our tradition,” and he looks imploringly past her, where is presumably met by fervent nods. “While I can tell you may find it foolish and petty,” Volstagg sounds outraged when Sif snorts, “grant our feasting hall a small token of our courtship for them to see, a small bit of spectacle, my darling, in your honour.”

“Okay,” Jane says, drawing out the second syllable, “I get that this is a thing you guys do; all in the vein of ‘get it out now before I’m the monarch and can’t play games anymore,’ sure. But _why_ am I on the table?”

“The Lady Darcy advises that the best things come in small packages, and she then said something about blue boxes and a sorceress named Tiffany.” The last part is mumbled; he’s repeating from memory because the words have no meaning to him.

“You put me on the table because _I’m short?_ ” Under normal circumstances, Jane would have been outraged, but since arriving to Asgard all of her standard reactions are currently undergoing retrofit under the rug. “Let me down,” she says, her tone flinty.

Thor’s expression darkens, and Jane reminds herself that this is a man unfamiliar with being denied. She waits him out, her own embarrassment mounting until it bleeds into frustration. Before she can stay anything else, however, he holds out both his hands to her, helping her down.

While it’s well-established that they’re obviously a romantic couple, Jane knows that there’s been a purposeful avoidance of any kind of label and certainly no mention of engagement or, she supposes in this lexicon, betrothal. Odin’s blessing – an unshakable necessity rather than a matter of sentiment – has not been given, and Jane is hesitant to put on any kind of show until her future with Thor is more than a figment of their starry imaginations. It feels to her like Thor doesn’t take this seriously – that Odin could send her back to Earth with a blank slate instead of her memory, should he so choose – and that grates. _Our lives are so different_ , she thinks with a frustrated hopelessness, before swallowing that thought down. When she looks to Thor for reassurance she finds thunder in his features instead, and her own temper flares in response. A small part of her ducks for cover; the rest of her, after years in a scientific community that never took her seriously, preps for a fight.

“I know this is an important tradition for you,” and while she was aiming for slightly sarcastic, Thor’s expression shifts to momentarily bewildered and she was _not_ expecting that, so it takes her down a peg. She pulls her voice from ‘angry physicist steamroll’ back to ‘rational person not understanding you’ and thanks Darcy for naming all the tones of voice she’s ever argued in. “But tonight is not the time for it.”

Thor is controlling his breath in a way that almost makes her nervous, but then, he also looks like he’s arguing inside his own head much more loudly than he’s focusing on her. He gazes over the rowdy hall, and then back down, taking in the tension in Jane’s shoulders. “What is it that unsettles you so?” he asks, and Jane almost goes off on a tangent about how this is _totally not my problem to sort out_ , but Volstagg interrupts them, gently oblivious.

“I’ll tell them it’s for next time, then, shall I?” but he’s already nodding to himself and skipping away before either Jane or Thor can respond, so maybe he saw more in the air between them that she gave him credit for.

“I feel like we shouldn’t go making announcements,” she tells him plainly. “We shouldn’t be public until you’ve been upfront with your parents.” It’s been grating on her all night, now that’s she being honest with herself, and the simple fact that she needs a king’s permission to move forward in her personal life is a fact Jane’s having a hard time stomaching.

Thor turns away from her and walks back around the table, looking over his shoulder once and inclining his head impatiently, as if she was meant to follow. Jane is purposefully slow to reach his side, and as the colour rises in his cheeks, she finds herself completely unsympathetic.

“Why?” he asks tightly.

Jane feels a bright flare of frustration at his anger, as if now that he’s home, Thor’s suddenly forgotten that certain things in their relationship are both implausible and impossible. “I don’t know,” she snips back, “let’s not forget that I’m human and you’re the king of an alien planet. You’re in the public eye,” she whispers harshly, and even as angry as she is, she’s unwilling to let prying eyes or ears into their conversation. “You – we – we don’t get to play these kinds of games, because we don’t get to take things for granted. We’re not engaged, not as far as your family or your people are concerned.” _And that leaves me with absolutely no room for error,_ she keeps to herself.

Thor paces widely, moving further back into the shadows and Jane feels like she’s chasing him, not for the first time. She can feel his temper rolling off his shoulders in waves, and when she tries to catch his hand on his next circuit he dodges her like it’s an accident. Frustration and panic racket up in her voice and she lets them – they’re well away from the revellers now.

“I’m not saying I’m not invested!” she yells, because for all that she knows he’s holding in his anger she feels like she’s talking to a wall. “And I’m not saying I want out. I’m trying to tell you that I’m nervous, but you’re _clearly_ not listening.”

“I am!” Thor nearly roars, standing stock still, practically vibrating. Then he takes a heaving breath and swears to himself his next words will be whispers. One hundred hot, angry thoughts circle in his head but he will not allow them to burn his mouth in speech. It frustrates him that Jane is always so bold and brave with her science, unafraid to stand alone with only her labour as evidence; yet she will not apply the same ferocity to her heart, will not indulge in idyll games for sentiment and sentiment’s sake alone. He feels in the pit of his stomach a slick, sharp feeling that perhaps she does not love him as intensely as he loves her and shoves it away, swallowing against his rising gorge and the ringing in his ears. _It couldn’t be true, couldn’t be real – Jane would not be here as she is if that were not the truth of the matter,_ he tells himself. He registers the boisterous cheering and chanting in the other room – he has led her to an antechamber to the Great Hall without the intention to do so – and it echoes the ferrous burning in his veins, his soul itching for Mjölnir and the high blood of a fight. Before him, Jane stands small and coolly agitated, and he curses her heart for its cages – both the vice grip she keeps on her emotions and the gemstones she’s wearing as armour, all of her so very far away, so untouchable.

He hates that he is losing his temper, with Jane of all people, but he’ll be damned to Hel if he’ll allow this to come to the booming spars he shares with his father. The words ‘my love’ and ‘my dear’ are thick and acidic in his throat; where his heart aches to say them his stomach turns at the notion that they might be only hollowly received. He leaves them there.

“Why don’t you ask the Lady Sif to escort you to the Queen’s chambers?” For all that he poses it as a question Jane feels the weight of his presumptuous authority like a heavy blanket. When he looks at her, she is wearing the same face as their night under the stars, the face that says he is dangerous and unpredictable and perhaps not worth the risk of trusting. The familiar warmth in her eyes is gone, replaced by an anger that glints like a flame on a blade. She inhales and purses her lips tightly, and Thor notices delicate hands in clenched, ineffectual fists. He watches the temper rise in her like a tide and feels a shell of satisfaction he will not allow himself to chase – he will not fight with her. A sour smile pulls at the muscle in his cheek and he clenches his jaw to hold it back.

Her expression shifts in response to his, an uneasy anger giving way to disgust, and she turns on her heel without another word. The red velvet billows and sweeps behind her, and he thinks the stones in the bodice are glinting back at him like they know a secret they’ll never tell.

He isolates himself for a few moments more, hearing Jane making her goodnights and apologies to the Warriors Three. He lets his anger roil hot in his belly, slowly sifts out any emotion that touches Jane and instead focuses on the purer rage that carries him until he feels like roaring with it. When he comes back to the table in the Great Hall, the air around him nearly crackles. He flashes his companions a predatory smile.

Fandral ignores it. “What foul mood has descended on you to send your beauty away?” he demands indignantly.

“A vexed one fixed for fighting,” Thor replies. It has the quality of a distant, warning roll of thunder. Fandral thinks his friend smiles the way a hungry lion might, all teeth and malicious intent.

“Our king is vexed by women! Then there will be no shortage of war,” Volstagg roars back before becoming almost conversational. “Will a simple brawl serve you tonight?”

“It is not women,” Hogun notes to his brothers-in-arms. “It is only her.”

Thor turns a glacial look on him. “For that,” he says softly, like this is a great honour, “you can go first.”

Whenever Hogun the Grim smiles, Fandral is very glad that he has never been on the receiving end of it. He watches, slightly awestruck, as Hogun takes a running leap onto the table, races down its length, and then flings himself into a flying roundhouse kick that slams Thor squarely in the chest, though the Aesir is already moving with the momentum and they both go down roaring.

“Huh,” says Fandral.

“Don’t tell me you’re shocked,” Volstagg grumps.

“But in the Great Hall?” He sounds the slightest bit scandalised. Before them, the Vanir receives a ghastly punch to the face, but once he’s down, he viciously kicks Thor’s feet out from under him. Volstagg looks at Fandral with a blank, unperturbed face.

“I guess,” Fandral replies, after a while. He sips his mead and jiggles his foot and hopes it will be his turn next; there’s a beauty of a serving girl whose attention he’s keen to catch. She’s all soft curves and rosy cheeks, and now looking at him with doe eyes under her lashes. _The King is home,_ Fandral thinks, _and my, things are improving._

 

 


	10. Ashes to Ashes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Blood, sugar, sex, magic.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Good things come to those who wait. I have gratitude for my readers, and boundless thanks to Sarah.

 

            Sif and Jane keep a quick, silent pace to the Queen’s chambers. The warrior can read clearly the conflicting emotions in the other woman’s face, and while she would never hesitate to help the Lady Foster, she has known Thor her whole life.  Sif would rather see both sides of their spat before getting involved, if she finds she must at all.

            The Midgardian woman follows just a half-pace behind her, brown eyes flicking over tapestries and banners as if she could go back to the Great Hall from memory alone. Sif halts her train of thought, reminding herself that this small life beside her found the Bifrost – and learned how to manipulate it, to some extent – and a banished Thor, then managed to guide him back to the divinity he’d lost. _Perhaps memorising a corridor is not such a challenge after all,_ Sif thinks, _even one with magic laid inside its masonry._ She catches Jane’s elbow gently - so lost in thought that she had nearly walked straight past Sif – and points discreetly to a pair of ornate golden doors guarded by two silent, golden sentries.

            “Thank you,” Jane says quietly. “I’m sorry you’re missing out on the feast.”

            Smiling to dismiss the idea of inconvenience, Sif replies in a much firmer voice. “I am simply glad to know Thor’s temper does not disarm you.”

            “He’s gonna have to do a lot more than raise his voice to shake me,” Jane asserts, “but I hope he gets this out of his system.” She doesn’t need to say ‘I hope he isn’t always like this now.’ It’s understood between them.

            “Shall I wait for you, my lady?”

            “It’s okay. I’ll find my way back, I’m sure,” Jane replies, looking at the door with some apprehension. She turns back to the warrior with as full a smile as she can muster. “Good night.” With that, she places both palms against the opulent doors and gives them a gentle shove, slipping delicately into the sparkling golden interior.

            Sif turns away, taking long strides up to the exposed corridor three levels above. It’s a much more circuitous route back to the Great Hall, but her pace is quick in the clear, cold air outside. She pauses momentarily, looking out the where the Bifrost should stretch its gleaming, infinite length. There is only the dark, choppy water of Asgard’s ocean beneath the starlight. She distracts herself with thoughts of the scientist’s work, wondering whether the small woman with such heart and bravery will be able to face so daunting a challenge as its repair. It takes her another few moments in the chill before the truer seeds of thought come to the forefront of her mind. Sif realises she does not doubt the scholar, but rather has been rendered off-balance by the woman’s words.

            When Jane of Foster had just now bid her good night, it had strangely sounded much more like a goodbye.

* * *

 

            The room gleams in the low light of several dozen candles, the flames flickering and reflecting off of one hundred different surfaces. All shades of gold and bronze and copper come back to her eyes, all accented in ivory and pale blue velvet. It is opulence and wealth imagined, and Jane finds it overwhelming. Metal screens have been placed over the archways that extend out the balcony – she can only recognise them because there are three more of the same in the rooms she shares with Thor – and on the far side of the space there is what Jane can only call a tapestry, thought it looks like it has been stitched from precious metals rather than delicate silk threads.

            Just to her left is a vast fireplace along the wall, and before and beside it are deep settees and matching ottomans all upholstered in the same pale blue. There are side tables with intricately carved legs that end in either avian talons or lion feet, and a third, larger table supported on eight horse legs. She recalls the tangled legends of Sleipnir, and wonders if the giant hawk and cat are other household pets she’s not yet been introduced to.

            The mantle above the fireplace has the only greenery in the main room; long, heavy, waxy green vines twist insidiously among carved cream-coloured figurines. Jane approaches the fireplace to look more closely, consciously keeping her scientist hands inside the folds of her gown. _See with your eyes, not your hands_ , says a childish voice that taunts her as she peers closer. They are an ivory of some kind, she reasons, and she is momentarily preoccupied about what kind of tusked animals might call Asgard home that she doesn’t immediately pick up on who the figures are meant to embody – at least, until she realises that she’s looking at the same slow smile that woke her up this morning. The hammer is held loosely in one hand, and the carving’s opposite arm is extended, as if to embrace a friend. Now that she knows what she’s looking at, Jane assesses the others quickly.

            The Lady Sif is halfway through pulling her broadsword from its sheath, wearing the grin of a predatory cat. Her hair is in wild curls, loose behind her. Hogun is as grim as he ought to be, extended mace in one hand, his other arm counterbalanced behind his back. His armour is much more detailed than the others, and its unique style sets him apart. Fandral’s figurine brings a soft smile to Jane’s face; with his rapier mid-twirl and one foot out in a jaunty step, he’s been captured with the expression that says, ‘not only will I slice you in half, but when I’m done I’m going to flirt with your wife.’ Volstagg is surrounded by a small gaggle of children, including a girl hoisted on his broad shoulders, his axe at his hip, and Jane reminds herself not to be surprised. The other figures take a moment of thought, though the young, regal woman with her hands clasped in front of her is surely Frigga. Odin, she realises, is also younger, teeth bared in a growl as he lunges with his staff. He is without the eye patch she’s been told of, and she finds him all the more menacing for it. The last one, by simple elimination, takes Jane aback. He wears armour more ornate than Thor’s and a sharp, thin grin under narrowed eyes. As tall as Thor, though not nearly as broad, what startles Jane is that unlike the others, both his hands are behind his back, leaving him unarmed. _He doesn’t need a weapon,_ she reminds herself of his visiting projection and what he was capable of then, _he is one._

            “My son Loki,” Frigga says very softly over her shoulder, “was very different in his youth than the man your world knows.”

            Jane startles at the intrusion to her thoughts, and spins around to face the woman approaching her. There are only two changes in the Queen’s appearance from the earlier feast: the intricate styling of her hair has been partially let down, and her jewelled metal sandals have been replaced by velvet slippers. Jane doesn’t know if she should curtsy or bow or do anything at all, but Frigga only gives her panicked look a small, indulgent smile before standing at her shoulder at the mantle. She reaches up and repositions the figurines of the brothers, and Thor’s previously outstretched, empty hand sits comfortably on Loki’s shoulder. The cunning smile on the latter’s lips looks much more like mild mischief, or perhaps like Thor has told a joke he already knows the punchline to and still finds amusing anyway.

            “But now more than ever,” she says, “they always express their hearts more truly when they are with the other; bravery and mischief alike.” Jane can’t find any words to reply with at first.

            “Are they ivory?” she asks stiffly. She feels the pressing need to say something and feels clueless in how to politely compare the brothers. She does realise, though, that her knowledge of Loki is biased, and privately refuses to be anything but glad that he’s in prison.

            The Queen hums in agreement. “Yes. Loki made them for me.”

            Jane looks at her with thinly veiled disbelief. Frigga moves past her, bringing out a small, dark chest from its recess behind the fireplace. Nestled inside black velvet are more figurines, though these are slightly discoloured and one is even cracked by a hairline fracture. “He gave me these when he was just a boy,” she says, holding out a much younger Thor and Loki, obviously in complimentary postures of play. Their parents are not particularly different, though Odin only has one eye, and in one hand, Frigga holds an apple. She gently passes young Thor into Jane’s empty palm.

            “They are dragon bone,” she explains quietly, “and do not fare well when touched by ice.” She does not elaborate that ‘ice’ could also mean the touch of a Jötunn, that it could mean Loki in his true form before his mother for the first time since his infancy, scarlet eyes weeping tears that froze on his cheeks.

            “Dragons?” Jane asks incredulously, with the same kind of wide eyes that Frigga remembers on her children. She does not allow herself to dwell in those memories and instead answers Jane patiently.

            “Yes, dear.”

            The scientist bites back her questions even as her mind reels with curiosity. Jane is certain the she has been invited here for a particular reason, and the last thing she wants to do is blabber uselessly in front of Thor’s mother. _There’s also that bit where she’s currently Queen of the Universe,_ she reminds herself mildly. Her thoughts derail when Frigga lightly touches the inside of her wrist with cool, soft fingers. Jane feels her face heat in a flash of embarrassment for not paying enough attention. An important question hangs in the air; Jane can read it in the Queen’s kind face.

            “It’s just… a lot to take in at once.”

            It may not have been the answer the Queen was looking for, going by her bemused expression. Jane isn’t given time to dwell on her error, though, because Frigga gently pulls her away from the mantle and down to the long, low settee. “You’ve already been shown to our library, my dear?” she asks. It is asked genuinely, without any conversational rhetoric.

            _Get out of your head,_ Jane scolds herself. She gives Frigga a grateful smile. “Yeah,” she replies, “Thor said the books I chose he hadn’t seen since he was small.”

            Frigga smiles indulgently. “He never quite had the patience for reading.”

            “I get that impression,” Jane blurts, and then wonders if it was at all appropriate. Frigga’s smile only pulls a little wider before she speaks again.

            “Assumptions aside, I did not ask you here to tell me things we both already know about my son,” she says, adding, “but I am made glad you are with us, and happier still to meet the woman who guided him to the wisdom he was without. Instead, I have selected a little more light reading for you, should you so choose. But I need something from you first, in exchange.”

            Jane is not expecting that. She sees the books on the table before them, but they are well out of reach and remain indecipherable from where she is. She twists her fingers together in her lap, and asks with some suspicion, “What’s that?”

            Frigga observes her actions closely. “Go now and stand before the golden curtain. Ten paces away should be comfortable,” she instructs.

            _Comfortable for whom?_  Jane asks herself, but she rises from the couch and does as she’s been asked. She’s slightly bothered to find that the curtain doesn’t look exactly as it did before – where earlier it shone like a solid piece of metal, now it carries the more reflective qualities of water. That it’s only a piece woven fabric only adds to her frustration.

            “What do you see?”

            “Water,” Jane delivers truthfully.

            “Like an ocean?” Frigga pushes gently.

            “Like a mud puddle,” Jane answers, a little cross. Though she doesn’t look away from the cloth, she can hear the smile in the other woman’s reply.

            “Try to focus on a single thread. Follow it.”

            The instructions are at first as opaque as the curtain they refer to until Jane catches a glint of white inside the gold and copper tones. She follows it, like tracing a mapped coastline from memory, like the sudden clarity of a jigsaw – one thread becomes two, three, six, ten; white threads standing out stark against the gold. Jane feels the jarring sensation of delayed recognition and swallows a gasp. The jolt causes her to take an unsteady step back.

            Frigga is still watching her intently. “Yes?” she prompts.

            Jane swallows again before she speaks. “It’s his face. It’s Thor’s face.”

_Good,_ Frigga thinks. “His expression?”

            “Neutral,” Jane supplies, “calm neutral. And he’s facing away.”

            “Weapons?”

            “No, just his head and shoulders.” Jane reaches a hand out as if to touch the curtain, though she is still a dozen paces away. “All his armour, though,” she adds, realising belatedly that she has dropped her voice down to a whisper.

            “Well done,” Frigga encourages. “That’s very good. Find another thread, now, and let it show you something else.”

            Jane takes a deep, steading breath and reclaims the space she lost to her surprise, stepping closer to the tapestry. This time, there is a dark flash of copper that jumps at the corner of her eye, and she rushes to chase it. She momentarily tries to keep Thor’s image there, but it blurs her vision uncomfortably, stinging like a harsh reflection of sunlight. After the lost moment, the ruddy copper comes back, and her eyes follow its intricate pattern until she’s nearly dizzy. All at once the single thread becomes a dozen, contrary to how Thor’s face grew more slowly. Jane feels her focus unspooling, trying to take in all the changes at once across the breadth of the curtain. Finally, it slows to a crawl. Though the image is complete, Jane isn’t immediately certain as to what she’s looking for.

            “Less clarity?” the Queen asks gently. Jane tries not to read into a tone that sounds like disappointment.

            “It’s very clear,” she replies, taking another step closer. “I just don’t know what it is.”

            “Well,” comes her response, “what is it not?”

            Jane has to admit to herself that it’s a reasonable question. “Human,” she answers surely. “It looks a little like a bat’s wing, but it’s all out of proportion. And the middle and distal metacarpals are all wrong.”

            “Any distinctive features?”

            “No, it’s…” Jane twists around to look at the Queen over her shoulder, even as Frigga hastily holds out a hand.

            “Don’t look away,” she says redundantly, tone humorous.

            Jane turns back quickly, but the copper-tinted wing is gone. Something else has snagged her attention, and she looks back around the gleaming room, gaze sweeping over the massive mantle. _The ivory,_ her mind whispers. When she faces Frigga again, she is met with concern. “No,” she repeats, “it was a dragon wing.”

* * *

 

            Frigga thinks that if she were a less formidable woman, realms would have fallen to ashes long, long ago. As it is, and as she is not, kingdoms still stand and secrets remain safe from the eyes and hands that would exploit them. Most important, perhaps, her sons could always find safety in her embrace; Mother’s smile was not strung with the insincerity and lies of so many other faces. She also chooses not to dwell on how very quickly she has shown Jane into that small circle in her heart. _There is no point in being anything but pragmatic,_ she reminds herself. _The girl will need as much guidance and reassurance as your children did when they were small._ Frigga’s thoughts continue to spin, but she instead focuses on Jane. She holds out one hand to the young woman, palm up. Jane comes back to her side at the settee.

            “I think that’s quite enough, dear.” She settles beside her with an air of curiosity that flows over the boundaries of better caution.

            “What was I looking at?”

            “A scrying tapestry,” Frigga explains, “though it is more importantly used to gauge someone’s aptitude for learning magic.”

            A whole host of questions blow through Jane’s mind, leaving her slightly winded. “Did I pass?” She aims for ‘neutral’ but her tone comes out just north of cynical.

            Frigga recognises the tone and chooses to ignore it. “Above and beyond, I would say.” She pulls forward the closest book from the table with a grace Jane doesn’t think she could copy.

            “Earth myths,” Jane says quietly, before Frigga can continue, “say a lot of things. And they get a lot wrong, too, but… But they say that you have ‘sight,’ like prophecy. They say that you can see the future.” Her voice does not waver; it is not a question.

            Frigga regards Jane carefully. She nods only once.

            “They also say that you can’t tell anyone what you see.”

            “Also true.”

            “That’s not what I just did, was it?”

            “The carpet shows both facts and symbolic representations. I hold less value in what you saw – rather I am both astounded and pleased you saw something more than a labyrinth, or perhaps a projected memory.”

            Jane wants to reach out and touch the leather-bound volume, but it still rests in Frigga’s lap. Her emotions feel tied-up and tangled. She is still concerned over her disagreement with Thor and thoughts of whether it will grow; she feels like she doesn’t have the energy to mistrust Frigga, as much as this exercise makes her wary. Not only that, but the Queen is motherhood and warm dignity personified, the sort of shoulder that invites weary heads to rest and children’s tears to dry. In short: she is an unfamiliar oasis, and Jane is parched from one hundred years in the desert. Her gravity is exhausting.

            “Why did we need to do this if you already knew I had magical capabilities, anyway?” And wow, Jane is not analysing that sentence. Her head already hurts.

            “ _You_ did not know you have magical capabilities,” she answers patiently. Jane looks sheepishly at her hands. “I move through life at the same pace as everyone else. Private foreknowledge cannot change the fate of an army. Intervention is nearly impossible; my own role is only just shy of inevitable.”

            “Oh,” Jane worries at a hangnail, tries not to bite her lip in embarrassment. “I’m sorry,” she says.

            “You have every right to your wariness,” Frigga replies, “but I must say this is clearly not the only matter weighing on your shoulders.”

            Jane debates for a moment before she speaks. “Thor and I… we had an argument, and I just… I…” she stumbles around for the right words, losing her courage as she does so. “I shouldn’t be telling you this,” she admits softly. She squares her shoulders and resolves to move on.

            “You’re telling because I asked,” Frigga points out, “and because I know what it is to court a love far from home.”

            Jane’s resolve flutters away like paper scaffolding, leaving her throat dry. All of the things she’s not allowed herself to say to Thor – or to Darcy, when she was nosy – well up in her chest. “I don’t want to lose sight of reality,” she says eventually. “I’m expecting sacrifice, and I know what that means and I’m just not sure if we’re on the same page there. We are on everything else, I mean,” she takes a quick breath and looks up from her hands to the Queen’s face. “We know what we want for the both of us, and that it’s going to take compromise.” She sighs, looking down at her hands again. “I just don’t want to sacrifice so much that I don’t recognise myself when I get there.”

            “Learning magic is a loss of a piece of your identity?” Frigga asks.

            “I’m a scientist,” Jane answers. Frigga thinks it sounds like a plea.

            She leans back for a moment, breathing deeply, and then on impulse reaches out to hold Jane’s hand. “When Thor came home from Midgard, the first time,” she says, “it took nearly two weeks and a few well-placed barbs from his companions for him to say anything at all.” Jane lets out a quiet breath, and Frigga looks at her sharply. “In reality, this was because the loss of the Bifrost meant a loss of contact to Midgard – and to you. He had made you a promise, and to know you were waiting filled him with a determination I had never seen before. When I finally pulled his story form him…” She smiles at Jane with all the warmth of summertime. “Let me say that it is both a wonder and a pleasure to have you here.” Frigga pauses for a moment, and Jane finds herself nostalgic for a certainty she’s not sure she can have. “With all of this in mind, tell me: what did my son tell you about magic and science?”

            “Where he comes from, they’re one and the same,” Jane echoes. The memory of chilled desert wind gives her a shiver.

            “Is that not the answer to your second dilemma?” Frigga asks, sitting forward again.

            Jane rolls the riddle around in her head, and deciding it doesn’t answer anything, moves on. “And the second?” she asks skeptically.

            “You are far too brave to lose what matters most, my dear. Your heart is the source of your curiosity and drive, is it not? The very thing that caused you to look to the starry sky?”

            Jane nods.

            “That drive is volatile and tempestuous, dangerous and fantastic. It gives you the ability to create or destroy absolutely; it gives you the power to do inconceivable things, turn kings and kingdoms alike into bones and dust, ashes upon ashes. I cannot teach you, it cannot be taught; rather it is something that can only be lightly guided, barely tamed.” Frigga stops speaking, watching Jane think. Eventually, she looks up.

            “I think I understand.”

            “Oh, you lionhearted child,” Frigga gently touches Jane’s cheek and the young woman leans into the contact of her palm. “Tell me, was I speaking of magic, or love?”

* * *

 

            They stand just inside the heavy, ornate doors, exchanging fond goodnights. Jane feels foolish and giddy with her new discoveries. She knows she’s overtired, but adrenaline skitters under her skin in the same electric way that Frigga’s magic had. _The same way your own does,_ she reminds herself.

            “Escort the Lady Jane to her chambers,” the Queen instructs, even as she pulls her in for a final embrace. “Morning will come soon enough,” she advises, “rest well.”

            Jane nods, drawing up her posture like she could stamp out her rattled nerves. “Thank you,” she says sincerely, stepping away from the Queen and moving to stand beside the golden, stern-faced guard. Frigga smiles softly once more and then steps back into her chambers, the doors closing with a rush of air and incense. Jane stares, transfixed, tracing the ornate carvings on the door panels with her eyes.

            “Milady.” Sharp, dark eyes have not broken their stare down the length of the corridor, but Jane knows the guard is perfectly aware of her, even as she is now, outside of his field of vision.

            “Right!” she says quickly, snapping out of her daze. “Let’s go.”

* * *

 

            The opening foyer to their rooms is full of tables and settees, a dining area, the bank of metal screens that hide the balcony’s vaulted archways at night. The largest of three fireplaces provides a false front for the bedchamber itself, as open and expansive as their rooms in Avengers’ Tower had been. In the main room, all the torches that guide the way to the disguised hall to their private bath are lit, but the candles themselves are all doused. _Just how long does ‘eat, drink, and punch everyone’ go on for?_ she asks herself, unwilling to name whatever emotion it is that twists her belly at the thought. Instead, she hurries quickly over to one table and picks up a forgotten volume, small and thick, its pages well-thumbed. Jane opens it halfway, so the spine balances in her open hand. Then, she does exactly as Frigga taught her, just moments ago.

_Think about the sound the pages make,_ she tells herself, _the flap and the hush and how the falling page slowly displaces all the air beneath it._

            All of this in mind, she holds her free hand just above the book and carves the air with a quick, swooping slice from her index finger.

            The page turns over with a soft crinkle and hiss. A feeling like pins and needles, shallow under her skin, skitters along her fingers and across the back of her hand. Jane shakes her hand like she’s received a zap of static, trying to dispel the sensation. Then, she closes the book with a snap.

_Oh my God,_ she thinks, feeling light and elated and a little untamed. She wants to jump, laugh, dance – and unconcerned with controlling herself, she twirls on the spot, the heavy train of her gown nearly lifting off the floor. Her happy thoughts are chased by more logical ones. _Metal corset, crap, get me out of this thing,_ and with that she turns on her heel and strides quickly into the dim bedchamber, velvet on flagstone making nary a sound.

            Like in the main rooms, all of the candles are still out. Moonlight filters in through the intricate metal screens over the balcony archway, and she can see in the light that the silks and duvets have already been turned down. The bed is enormous – there is no measure on Earth that could match it, even in Tony’s tower. The posts and legs that support it and its canopy are huge; thicker than her body and made of finely carved wood and stained to pitch black, though the fine grain still shows through. The towering headboard has been carved with constellations – a good number that she recognises – and the footboard bad been carved with the accepted symbolic representation of Yggdrasil, its roots and branches stretching out, thin and vast. The bed is on its own raised pavilion, and she can see from the flickering shadows that the large fireplace has been laid and lit for them. Near it, there are two grandiose high-back chairs. _Palace or no palace,_ she tells herself, _the only place for a fancy dress at the end of the night is over the back of a chair._

            She nearly drops her book when she rounds the bed. Sitting, not in a chair but rather directly on the floor is Thor. His hands are laced together in the space between his legs, elbows on his knees. He’s already taken off most of his armour, but is still in his vambraces and mail. He’s looking into the fire with the same kind of concentration she gave Frigga's scrying tapestry. He looks away from it and towards her when he hears her sucked-in breath.

            “Jane,” he calls to her, already shifting hurriedly to stand upright. His face is tight with concern.

            “No, no,” she insists, coming towards him. She perches on the lip of a chair. “Stay,” she says, and he settles back down from his interrupted crouch. He presses his back against the leg of the other chair and lets out a muted sigh. His gaze is heavy on her, and Jane feels both the weight of their argument and the relief of his company, and under all of that, the bubbling desire to show him what she’s learned. She sets the book down behind her on the chair’s cushion. The crackle of the fire fills the space between them for a moment, and Jane speaks first. “I’m sorry for earlier,” she says. She’s not sorry, however, for what she said, and she doesn’t feel responsible. It’s more that she’s sorry the night had been spoiled by something so petty, and she’s not about to let it sit and fester between them. “I--”

            “I think the true apology belongs on my lips, my love,” he interrupts. Jane draws a breath and lets him speak. “I forgot how very foreign all of our traditions must seem to you, but that does little to excuse my loss of patience.” He holds her gaze steadily and keeps his hands down at his sides like he hasn’t the permission to touch her. “Jane,” he rasps, and she feels surprise at how muted he is, how his golden light seems to have nearly extinguished, “please forgive my actions. With reflection, I was overbearing and unkind. I am sorry.”

            Jane finds herself nodding, and sweeps a non-existent hair away from her face. “Yes,” she says simply, reaching out for one of his hands. Thor looks at her carefully, and it’s not until she gives him a small smile that the relief comes over his features and he reaches back towards her. She pets her thumb over his knuckles for a moment. “I would just feel better if you filled me in on the plan, next time.”

            They sit in this bridged silence for a minute longer, and Thor takes in the sight of her. There is an energy running under her skin, some sense of accomplishment he can read in the line of her shoulders, showing itself as pride and pleasure even in this muted atmosphere. He wonders what she and his mother spoke of, though not in a worrisome way. Her brow knits gently, and the fingers playing with his hand come to a sudden stop.

            “Did you tell your mother about us?” she asks hesitantly. “I mean, how serious this is?”

            Thor shrugs one massive shoulder, and the mail clinks as he shifts. “No,” he says, “I thought it somewhat needless. She knows I love you, and that suffices,” he smiles at her. “The coming conversation with my father is a greater concern. Why?”

            Jane shakes her head minutely. “I’m just trying to put the pieces together,” she dismisses, while the back of her mind rolls around with the new information. Her fingers tangle once more with his, and he looks at her with a wide open, honest face. She watches the shadows play over his features, notes the shadow of a bruise on his jaw, a faint scratch over his brow, and doesn’t mind at all that she has lost her train of thought.

            “What aren’t you telling me?” he teases her gently. Jane bites her lip, and then squeezes his hand before letting go, reaching back to snag the book she’d hidden behind herself.

            Try as she might, she can’t keep the grin off her face. “I learned something,” she announces, and she feels the magic prickle under her skin. “Your mother taught me something.” She sets the book in her lap carelessly at first, and then takes both of his hands, unfolding them to face palms up, then places the book across them. A bemused smile tugs on the corners of Thor’s mouth, but he stays silent. Jane is momentarily still, her hands in small, loose fists. She closes her eyes, breathing deeply once, and calls on the ghosts of the sounds, sights, and sensations she’s about to bring forward. Then, in perfect tranquility, she leans back ever-so-slightly and flicks one finger. The cover of the book flops open into Thor’s waiting palm.

            When Jane opens her eyes, she finds him grinning at her, looking all of bewildered, excited, and proud at once. Jane grins back all the more broadly at his approval, and steadily flicks her finger so the pages flip like they’ve been caught in a breeze.

            Thor wonders momentarily if she can see her own seiðr, and decides she cannot. It swirls and grows around her, and the way she is so happily oblivious keeps him from pointing it out at this moment. His own, without the lightning or Mjölnir, is a small, white, trembling thing that flutters like snow in the wake of his cape. Artifacts already imbued with magic will respond to him, but he cannot bring objects to life. Loki’s green cloud, a constant companion, has grown only darker and bolder with the passage of time. Their mother’s is an icy blue that glitters over everything she does or touches; his father’s is a fierce red fog hidden but always present, even after centuries of neglect. Jane’s seiðr is pale, blushing lavender, and it reminds Thor of small, proud winter flowers and the amethyst in the cliffs of Nidavellir. It is jubilant and steady and perfect for her; small and fierce and his heart clenches at the sight. How he loves her in that moment – it leaves him without words.

            She watches him watching her, and Jane’s smile starts to slide at his sombre expression. Her hand falls to her lap, and the book flops closed, the lovely lavender seiðr retreats into the folds in the air around her.

            “What’s wrong?” she whispers. She slides her hand up his arm to grip his wrist loosely. Thor shakes his head like he can shake away his thoughts before he replies, and the silence stretches like a yawn between them. He places the book to the side and stands, holding his hands out to her beseechingly. He feels suddenly conflicted and hurt, but all that shows in the firelight is a softness in his eyes that Jane knows is hers alone.

_Loki is in prison, as is just,_ he tells himself, _though it feels wrong and unfair. Father is in the Odinsleep and so the throne is yours and yours alone, as he always intended. And Jane…_ and here his thoughts stutter, for she’s suddenly more fragile with that seiðr under her fingertips, more human in a world that to her must be mystery and madness. _Jane, who is brave and loyal and true. Where would you be without her?_ He knows that her ability and her magic have always been hers, always been inside her, but Thor momentarily wants to curse his mother for opening this door, pulling back this blind, for giving Jane such a dangerous gift. He wants to cry at her shoulder like a boy, wants to carry the title of king like a yoke fit only for his shoulders, wants to make both of these woman proud of the man he’s become.

_I will tell her soon,_ he thinks, _but this silence has gone on too long. We have so little time as it is. Tomorrow’s worries shall not come stealing tonight._ Thor bows his head down, touching their foreheads together. “There is nothing wrong, my love,” he tries to convince her, but his tone falls unexpectedly short.

            Jane smiles somewhat sadly against his lips, skating her palms along the armoured vambrances at his wrists up to his elbows, where they give way to leather. “I don’t believe you,” she breathes, and she feels a tightness somewhere under her heart.

            Thor presses their lips together, firm and chaste, before pulling back to repeat aloud what he has just told himself. “Let us leave tomorrow’s troubles where they lay and spend this night in peace.”

_Or in pieces?_ she thinks, but Thor has taken his hands from her waist to cradle her back and her nape, and he is looking at her in such a way that she feels lightheaded, hot and cold all over, all at once. She swallows thickly. “Promise?”

            “Always.”

            Jane slides her hand down his arm to grip his wrist, using it as leverage so she can balance on her toes and kiss him again. The kiss deepens, and when her pulse pounds in her ears for the want of air she breaks away, tipping her head back to heave a gasping breath. Thor mouths a hot, wet line down the column of her throat, and she arches farther back in reaction he uses the momentum to catch her in the crook his arm, lifting her up properly against his chest. She leans back into his space with laughter on her lips and gently twists several small braids between her slender fingers, just to watch him close his eyes when she tugs.

            “I think,” she whispers, a little breathless, “I think I’m done waiting.”

            Thor freezes, holding himself still and his composure in check. When he finds his voice, he speaks his words against Jane’s neck. “You are certain?” He pulls back to look at her, and the firelight casts his eyes in shades of indigo.

            “Yes.” Her cheeks are rosy and her mouth is trying to hide a smile, but her gaze is steady on his. Thor’s responding grin is slow and wolfish, and watching his expression shift lights a fire inside of her. Thor carries her the few paces over to their bed, and Jane keeps her knees under herself, so that kneeling, and with Thor one step down, they’re almost eye to eye.

            “Tell me, love,” he asks seriously, trailing his fingers up her sides, tracing the pattern in the corset and teasing the underside of her breasts, “have you also learned to rid yourself of raiment with such ease?”

            Jane twists her fingers just a little tighter into his hair. “That,” she grouses, breathing hotly against his mouth, “would require knowing how to get out of it in the first place.” Thor laughs until her soft lips find the thrum of his pulse and her teeth worry the skin gently, and then the laugh falls into a groan. Distracted, he pulls off his vambraces and the leather braces from his arms, letting them fall to the wayside.

            “Asgardian wear is not so challenging,” he tells her, reaching for the discreet hooks that hold the corset closed. As it loosens, Jane inhales hugely, arching her back.

            “Speak for yourself,” she declares, still breathing deeply even as she gathers the fine, heavy links of his mail in her hands.

            Thor steps out of her arms momentarily, dropping down another step. He reaches back over his head, gathering the mail and the shirt beneath it by the fistful, hauling both over his head smoothly with the muffled sound of metallic slithering as he drops both to the floor. His replying grin is cocky. “I am.” The firelight plays on the hard lines and planes of his body. As he climbs the steps, his expression shifts again, this time into something softer. Thor looms in her space, laces his fingers into her hair, and lays a kiss like a breath on her lips. It is just the sort of gentleness Jane expects from him, though she didn’t anticipate the action.

            His voice is rough and as deep as she’s ever heard it. “Are you certain, Jane?” he asks her again. If a mountain could whisper, that’s the sound that echoes in her chest.

            She cradles his face in her hands, tracing his lip with the pad of her thumb. Her palms skim down his bare arms, and she replaces his hands on her body where the dress’s laces are hidden. His fingers follow her lead, catching the threads, but he does not move yet. “Yes,” she says, leaning up to kiss him again.

* * *

 

            “Yes,” she says, when the velvet of the gown falls away and they are pressed together, chest to chest, skin to skin, heart to heart for the first time.

            “Yes,” he sighs, his hands huge on her torso; bracketing her hips, cradling her ribs, balancing her weight as she rocks their bodies together.

            “Yes,” she gasps, as his beard rasps at the soft insides of her thighs and she twists her fingers tighter into his hair.

            “Yes,” he whispers, when she kisses each scar he keeps on purpose, promising to tell her all those stories, in time.

            “Yes,” she sighs, as the sheen of sweat cools on their bodies and he teases oversensitive flesh with ghosting fingertips. “Yes, there.”

            The fire at the far end of the room has burned low, and it leaves them in a darkness only lessened by the starlight that filters through in delicate shadows from the balcony screens. All the linens and silks have been thrown or have fallen from the bed, and only a fraction of the pillows remain. Thor is stretched out on his back, and Jane has draped herself over him, her cheek to his chest. She has started to feel the chill on her back and thighs, but Thor is warm, and so she just holds closer. He wraps an arm over her shoulders, and his fingers trace mindless patterns leading nowhere on the thin skin over her ribs.

            She leans up slightly on one elbow, pressing a kiss into the inviting flex of muscle and sinew just below his jaw. Thor lets out a low sound, his hand squeezing around her waist in response. She doesn’t need to say anything, instead just mouthing ‘I love you’ into the skin beneath her lips. His own heart beats strong and slow with the words. It shakes him sometimes, to feel so strongly, so convicted in an emotion. “Always,” he tells her, lips against her hair.

            Jane nods, and using the pad of her thumb, gently turns him to face her. She presses small kisses over his lips and jaw, each one like a token that says _yes, yes, yes._

 

 


	11. The Love I Harbour in Your Name

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Frigga wears her wounds differently than he does, Odin realises. Their shared millennia together has taken the grace of her youth and made it into a petrified thing, hard and opalescent and all the more beautiful for surviving.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The following two chapters will take us back to Earth, and things start to really ramp up. Sarah, your patience is a blessing. Thank you.

 

 

            Thor shifts in his sleep and Jane blinks awake, his familiar shape an island in a sea of unfamiliar things. The mist has sunk low during the night, surrounding the palace and even drifting into their rooms through the brass balcony screens. Only several thin sheets and one heavy, black-tipped fur have survived; all the silks and pillows had been discarded in the course of the night, as usual. She and Thor are as tangled as they as always are, and his warmth and bulk are comforts. He shifts again, and this time Jane rolls with him so she can face out to the rest of the room, not just the cavernous, vaulted ceiling. The press of his skin against hers is quietly thrilling – their expressions of love mean no less than before, now that they’ve crossed into the territory of physical acts. She casts her eyes over all the small and large wonders in the room, the absolute wealth that reflects in every gilded thing back to her, even in her sleepy fog. Alone and without context, to her they mean objectively nothing, and the ideals and dogmas they stand for are foreign and in some cases uncomfortable.   _Even so,_ she tells herself, _it means Thor._

            When they were on Earth, he never behaved as if he found humans low, or base, or animalistic; though on the whole, Asgard seems to regard them as something like mice, small and nervous and always making for war. But Thor does not see humanity like that – certainly not her. In his time as a man, he always would ask her what they would do tomorrow and the following day, needing, it seemed, to count or keep track. It took her a while and a good deal of patience to finally understand – he would ask her about tomorrows because as far as he was concerned, she simply didn’t have enough of them. It was as if she couldn’t grasp just how little time they had since humans had never experienced anything longer. Now, the opulence here strikes her because beyond all of the physical wealth, there is also an enormity of time.

            Jane thinks benignly on her first few days here – her mornings with Sif in the weapons’ vault, learning first how to handle the small blades so easily concealed. Jane understands some of it: Asgard is a society soaked in blood and war. She thinks instead of her afternoons under Frigga's guidance, sunshine filtering through vast greenness in the gardens and the warm paper-and-leather smell of the library. She thinks of Thor, with his father still in the Odinsleep and the burden of the throne rightfully balanced on his broad shoulders. It is a duty he cannot simply shirk, and it leaves them spending more time apart than together. They do have these moments, like now, even in the middle of this wealth and opulence, where it is still just the two of them, unchanged.

            The sharp shaft of a single feather has worked itself out of the silk sheet casing the mattress, and rather than pluck it as she once would have, Jane uses a small puff of magic to work it out. It hovers a few inches above the mattress, and Jane traces her finger in small, lazy circles, making it spin in suspension. She grows bored of it quickly, however, and begins to wonder about the process of replication, if there’s more to it than just the simple projection of expectation, especially if there’s no need for it to stand up to touch or – _oh –_ scrutiny.

            A second feather now floats beside the first, spinning anticlockwise.

            Jane has done enough reading to know that to craft projections that can move independently or withstand touch takes years of perfection and study, but she hadn’t anticipated that simple copies would come to her so quickly. Out of sheer curiosity, she tries again. _After all, curiosity is what got you here in the first place._ With greater concentration, two becomes three, and then five, and then without really paying too much attention Jane has a cloud of perfect, downy feathers, drifting a foot above the bed like they’ve been forgotten by a passing gust of wind.

            “You’ve been practicing.”

            Thor gently runs a sleepy hand over her skin, tracing the line of their pressed-together bodies. His lips press slow, open mouthed kisses over the nape of her neck. Jane loses her focus, and the single original feather floats back down to the bed, its copies disintegrating into quickly-dispersing lavender smoke.

            Jane catches his wandering hand and kisses his knuckles. “Good morning.”

            The room is still grey and misty, and there is very little daylight yet. “Nonsense,” Thor rumbles, gently manhandling her into rolling over so he can speak, sleep-slow, over her laughing lips. “I will not have any fool talk of morning whilst I lie abed with my love.” He shifts down her body, laying his forehead against her breastbone, and Jane trails her fingers up his neck, gently sifting her fingers through his hair. He supports his weight on one arm, and his free hand slides down the length of her side, catching the crook of her knee. Softly, softly, he presses their bodies more closely together. Jane shifts, searching and sighing, letting her nails catch on his shoulders. “All duties have been hereby annulled,” he declares, his voice a low whisper, “and this day is accordingly reserved for love and lovers only.”

            “Oh?” Jane teases, rocking her hips. “Even for the --” her breath hitches as his fingers drag lower, “-- king?”

            Thor growls and moves in time with her motions. “The king,” he explains, “has been felled by a beautiful sorceress who practices her magic in bed at dawn.” He rocks down and holds still for a moment before sliding lower down her body, pressing kisses into her belly even as Jane squirms. He pauses at her hips, spreads his arms over her belly, and rests his chin on his wrists. Jane pets his face, and Thor momentarily catches one finger between his teeth, looking over her whole hand with cross-eyed suspicion. He kisses each fingertip in turn, and then says, “Our Lady Sif told me you were hurt…”

            “It was just a little cut.”

            “…and that you promptly healed yourself.”

            She doesn’t know how to read his tone, but his eyes are clear and unwavering. For a moment she doesn’t know what to say, and then reminds herself: _This is Thor. He doesn’t play emotional games like that; stop overthinking._ “Yes,” she whispers, colouring it with pride.

            Thor is still examining the hand in question. It really had only been a small cut, clean across the fleshy space between her index finger and thumb. It had done more to startle her than harm her, and Jane had found herself mumbling the words to a spell she had only read and never practiced. She remembers now the hot, itching sensation, and how after it had passed and she had wiped her hand from the sticky blood, where there was nothing underneath but new, perfect skin. She notices now, with Thor’s inspection, that the old, faded electrical burn scars on the soft side of her little finger are gone, too. She decides not to bring it up now, but does resolve to think upon it later.

            “Perhaps,” Thor says, and Jane can see the gears of family and politics whirring under his brow, “perhaps you would like to meet the Bifrost’s reconstruction teams today.”

            “I can?” For a moment, all of her thoughts stutter to a halt.

            “Of that, there is no question. Your magic has progressed with excellence,” and at this he smiles at her with guileless pride, “and I feel that our methods would be an invigorating challenge rather than an overwhelming obstacle.” His tone, however, is leaving something unsaid.

            “What’s bothering you?” she asks, thumb smoothing over his brow.

            Thor sighs. “There are rumours that my father will wake from the Odinsleep in scant days’ time,” he says heavily. He leaves the statement hanging in the air as he studiously traces the edged shadows of Jane’s lowest ribs. “It weighs on me,” he finishes. “He will have expected that I have been to see Loki.” Jane doesn’t reply immediately, and he looks to her eyes, warm brown watching him the same way she watches the stars. “I worry if I have made the best decisions for Asgard – for us – while the throne is mine alone.”

            She still feels like he’s holding back, so she gently knocks his side with her thigh. His weight doesn’t shift at all, but he smiles anyway, pressing an absent, beardy kiss into the bare ridge of her hip. “That’s still not everything,” she says.

            “The artifact you found on Midgard is of great importance, but the Bifrost is close to your heart. I would have you find your place as the leader in its reconstruction before…” he trails off. “You did not come all this way for sessions at court or long rides through city streets.”

            “It’s beautiful here, Thor,” Jane protests gently, “and incredibly interesting. I mean, those little kids we saw yesterday? The ball they were playing with would advance our technology by _decades_.” Jane knows, however, that she’s only talking around his point. The book and the Bifrost are the reasons she’s here, and even though it’s only been a few days, it’s hard to keep from getting antsy. Learning magic had been her go-to distraction, and even with all her progress, she had entertained and dismissed the thought of asking to be involved just yet. Thor had been dealing with … something for the last few days, and whatever it was it had left him with deep creases around his eyes, weariness in the lines of his shoulders that only evaporated when they crawled into bed at night.

            “The Bifrost is your life’s work, Jane. I will not keep you from it.”

            “Oh,” Jane says softly. It isn’t even that she had anticipated he would – her determination, she knows, is one of the things he admired most about her. But she has for so long and so many times staunchly defended herself - and her work - that it feels a little strange to have someone else declare its importance to her with such forthright honesty. “Thank you,” she says, “but we both need to remember that court is important, too. I can’t…” she can’t help but feel nervous with the ferocity her own heart musters, not when everything they want feels so far away, so impossible. Watching the grace with which Frigga plays palace politics leaves Jane feeling unprepared. “I have a lot to learn,” she finishes.

            He smiles at her softly, if a little sadly. “We’ll have the time,” he tells her. “We have the time.” Then he seems to shake himself internally, and his face shifts into a sly grin as he looms over her, lipping damp kisses into her neck while his fingers skim her sides. Jane can’t contain her giggles. “But I have heard the king’s declaration, and all such matters must be withheld.” There is laughter in his eyes when she meets his gaze. “This is a day for love alone,” and Jane is about to lose it, because he’s using the same tone of voice as when he lies to Tony so egregiously, “and if there is any learning to be done,” Jane has a moment to wildly think _Oh, no_ as his hands slide down to the backs of her thighs, “I would much rather learn what happens when I kiss you _here._ ”

* * *

 

            Thor feels tight and wild in her presence like this; feels her release perhaps more keenly than his own. All of her muscles are flexing, all of the pieces that hold her together are so gently, gently shaking apart. Her thighs tremble under his hands and her back is in a high, wild arch. Thor waits, drawing this out for the both of them, waits for the blinding, blissful moment when her release will flood out over his own senses, when it will echo through him; her body a straining, beloved bow in his calloused huntsman’s hands.

            Jane, to him – even in these moments, so certainly in these small, precious moments – is his reason and his reasons enough. She has become his treaty for peace, his cry for war, his patience for diplomacy and his sobriety of thought. She is his philosophy of truth and trust in truth; her unwavering faith in him the mortar with which he builds and betters himself.

            Before her, he was a warrior slowly being folded into the shape of a king. In her company on Midgard, he found himself willfully reformed by her iron will, her soft hand, her hard science, her faultless love. But here, now – home, with the throne before him and Jane at his side, his equal in all ways – she has asked him to be great, and he prays to her alone that she finds him worthy of the love she harbours in his name.

            Hurt, Battle, and War: all the sharp and brutal things he was made for, the things he took into his breast in what he once thought of as the truest of loves, the mistresses of his youth. Never had Surrender ever tainted his blood, nor ever touched a golden hair on his head, but Thor finds he had only ever guarded himself with simple, violent, childish pride. Now, a lifetime away, Victory is still his mantle of roses though he wears it not, lays it down as a carpet for her small feet, if only to see Jane smile, feel the petal-softness of the skin at her ankles, more prized in his esteem than any realm’s flower. And never, never has she asked it of him – not once – but he fights in her name and hers alone. He is the Mighty Thor, God of Thunder, Protector of Midgard, King of Asgard, the Realm of Light Eternal, soon to be Allfather to the Nine Realms. For all their differences, each shade of night and day, peace and war, scholarship and battle that separates them, her name is the only sound on his lips.

            He has found holiness in the curve of her hip, the sweat that sheens on her skin in the pale morning light, the mantra his name becomes as she sighs, moans, prays to him. It is not worship, is not religion; it is the absolute faith in their love for one another, and it shakes him, it shakes him apart. Jane is trembling in his arms, all of her clinging to him, all of her words lost to thin, hitching pleas, disjointed and oblivious to everything but his touch. Not begging, not babbling, and Thor finds himself responding in kind. Her words catch, crack, and tumble from her lips in her climax as his cascades upon him in turn. A blissful fire burns in his chest and it feels like promises, the promises he’s making that roll from his tongue.

            “Anything, my love. Anything, always. Always, always, please Jane, just stay, stay, stay.”

* * *

 

            Odin blinks awake as he feels he always does – no better rested and perhaps more malignant than before. There is a weariness that will not leave him now, and if he is honest, that weariness had laced its fingers between his ribs the day he brought home his foundling, and it has only squeezed harder since. He dresses slowly, in silence and with some wariness. Where is the palace’s attention, if not outside his door? Then, a silky, soot black raven lands with a croak and the singing slice of sharp feathers in air, and he knows with searing clarity what Munin knows, what Hugin knows: Thor has returned with his scholar and an object of unthinkable darkness in her hands. Odin’s mind is shown, from their flickering perspectives, the Queen’s decision to bring them here and to guise it as his own will. Truthfully, it is, though he was not awake to voice it. Frigga knew – or anticipated – and acted, the result of a thousand seasons side by side. As a younger man, when their love was ripe, he would have found it charming. _But now you are old,_ he says to himself, _and you are tired, and this is simply your life._ He calls for Heimdall and a boy for his armour. He will call for his wife, but only after he learns every detail and secret of the recent days’ events as if he’d lived them himself.

            Heimdall enters without small pleasantries, and Odin orders, “Tell me,” without any elaboration. With rapt attention he listens to the tale of Thor’s return. What stays with him, like a sticky residue, is to hear how the warriors and nobles of the city are thrilled with the Midgardian woman that has come trotting behind him.

            “The Queen has invited the Lady Foster to join in aiding those of the Bifrost’s reconstruction,” Heimdall tells him, brilliant amber eyes looking levelly at his king and seeing so much more. “At first, all parties expressed hesitation. Now her seiðr persuades them yet.”

            “Her seiðr?” Odin wonders. Humans of Midgard haven’t touched real sorcery since his youth.

            “The Queen teaches her,” Heimdall relays without inflection.

            “She is capable?” Odin does not contain his incredulity.

            Heimdall’s distantly-focused gaze turns to rest heavy and precise on his king. “She is gifted.” Again, his voice is empty of emotion.

_Frigga does not waste her while,_ Odin reminds himself. “Tell me of the object,” he changes tack, tone weary.

            “It is a text, contained in an impenetrable box of the Lady Foster’s conception, stored now in the Vault. It details your son’s entire life.”

            “And it is not a lost artefact of the Norns?”

            “It bears no traces of its creators. The air around it leaks only shadows.”

            “And no one has examined it?” Odin can feel his impatience rising. With Heimdall’s arrival he has sent the boy to bring him Frigga, and he knows her entrance is imminent, and so too is the loss of this privacy.

            “Not of yet.”

            Odin begins to pace, nodding mostly to himself. Heimdall knows he has been dismissed, yet he waits.  The King pins him with his unforgiving eye, and he is tempted to count aloud the Queen’s dwindling paces to the door.

            “What?” Odin barks.

            “There is only one so versed in this dark magic.”

            Odin finds himself nearly shaking with a blind fury. “No!” he roars. Heimdall, only paces away, does not flinch, nor does he blink under his helm. Unshaken, he nods once, and then turns away sharply, returning to the post he had left only in body, but not in duty.

            Odin, exhausted, clings to the post of a chair-back and tries to steady himself from that sudden hot, shaking wave of temper. He finds himself feeling only more volatile as he ages, his scars and miseries all leaving him as a smoking crumbling shell of the man he once had been. Down the corridor, the heavy steps of a half-dozen Einherjar sound in clattering unison, heralding the arrival of the Queen. _Frigga who you made your wife,_ he curses himself, _but it was War you made your lady. She has loved you into blackness, and now she hates you with the fire of a hundred vengeful suns. Sons, even, be you truthful. Look at your choices, old man,_ he scolds himself, _and look at the crippled hands they fall from._

            Odin barely has time to straighten his posture before Frigga sweeps into the room. _You’ve put on your armour; now wear it like a man._ He can see the pleasantries forming in the air around her lips, the propriety and royalty that accompanies her very footsteps. She meets the ice in his eyes, and the words turn to ashes on her tongue. With a subtle movement and a single look, she orders her chaperones out. The cacophony of their armour is silenced when the golden doors fall closed.

            “Husband,” she acknowledges him stiffly.

            He feels a rising tide of spite, feels his shoulders curved down under the weight of it. He takes a few steps forward, places a palm lightly against her cheek as he has countless times before. “I loved you first,” he says softly, in a tone of bitter vindication. _Loved you ferociously, loved you best, best of all._  “I loved you first.”

            “I know,” she tells him, whisper soft, honest, the same way she has told him everything else. “And I love you still.”

_Your redeemer, your downfall,_ he tell himself, taking on of her willing hands into both of his much larger ones. _If you had to choose the hands to die by… well, let it be said she’s still the best thing that’s ever happened to you._ They are the same hands they have always been – Frigga wears her wounds differently than he does, Odin realises. Their shared millennia together has taken the grace of her youth and made it into a petrified thing, hard and opalescent and all the more beautiful for surviving.

            Without a further word, she places Gungnir into his hesitant palms. The staff hums and glows momentarily, and Odin feels his authority find footing in his hollow chest.

            “No one has studied the text?” he asks her, knowing already her answer.

            She steps gently away from him. “Do not forget how well I know you.”

            He growls. “I need an obedient wife, not a willful shadow,” he tells her sharply, and immediately regrets it. Things are already dissolving, but he feels too tired and bitter to apologise as he once might have. Her expression hardens.

            “You need not nurse your pride like a babe in arms,” she tells him coolly. Odin voices a sound of outrage, but Frigga continues over him. “Thor has acted wisely as king in your stead, but there is danger coming, and your son needs his father.” Odin quiets, and she amends, “Both your sons.”

            “I have only one,” he answers curtly.

            “ _Enough!”_   Her tone rocks him back on his heels. “We have war enough,” she says with sharp simplicity, “I will not fight with you.”

            “No,” he starts to pace, “you will not, too occupied playing small tricks with a human child.”

            “Your heart hardens,” she accuses, standing stock still.

            “And yours grows soft,” he answers, turning on his heel to stare. “Heimdall professes her ability. Can you find it in yourself to be honest?”

            Frigga looks at him with stony eyes. “Could you overcome your arrogance to believe me?” Odin heaves a tired sigh, and the will to fight abandons him.

            “Where is she?”

            “The Bifrost, and working. Thor entertains diplomats from the Muspelheim Accord, enticing them to withdraw their roaming warriors from Yggdrasil’s branches.”

            “I will see her,” he says mostly to himself, nodding, “and then this book.”

            “See Loki first,” Frigga advises, her voice soft, “and give _my_ son back his silver tongue.” The inflection is slight, but there all the same.

            Odin is caught by her blunt request. “Why?” he demands. “He tells only lies.”

            She smiles sadly, and one of Odin’s ravens comes to perch on her outstretched hand. “To do so, he must know each inconvenient truth.”

 

 


End file.
